


Desiderium: A Modern Borgia Siblings Episode

by CreziasAlias



Series: Modern Nostalgia: A Borgia Siblings Tale [2]
Category: Borgia: Faith and Fear, The Borgias (Showtime TV)
Genre: Borgiacest, F/M, Forbidden Love, Historical References, Modern Era, Moral Ambiguity, Renaissance Reminiscence, Sexy Times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:14:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29082957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CreziasAlias/pseuds/CreziasAlias
Summary: [Modern/AU] Lucrezia's big wedding day is getting closer, but instead of focusing on the preparations, she's trying to frustrate her brother by way of revenge for his actions at the football game. Unfortunately, their obsessive behaviour with each other makes it difficult to see the outside world clearly, and to keep business and personal matters apart. This lands the siblings in an uncomfortable and risky situation where they have to confront both their father and one Cardinal Andrea Ruggiero.
Relationships: Alfonso d'Aragona (1481–1500)/Lucrezia Borgia, Cesare Borgia & Lucrezia Borgia, Cesare Borgia/Lucrezia Borgia, Cesare Borgia/Rodrigo Borgia | Pope Alexander VI
Series: Modern Nostalgia: A Borgia Siblings Tale [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2133750
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	1. Part I: The Invitation

**Author's Note:**

>   
> **Desiderium** is an ardent desire or longing, a feeling of loss or grief for something lost, but it is also a kind of internal sin in Christianity, meaning simply a desire for what is sinful. Guess I need not specify who this applies to...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucrezia visits Cesare and decides to play a particular game of vengeance to assert her independence of him and perhaps, to some extent, to gain control over him. It quickly gets out of hand for both of them.

Cesare was in a meeting with Cardinal Andrea Ruggiero and Cardinal Rover Catalano in the basement of the Cathedral of Saint Augustine when his sister walked through the front doors of the Church, carrying a letter of great importance. She went straight to his office on the first floor, where she’d never been before but which she managed to find because it was the only office that did not have a single cross hanging on the wall.

Ironically enough, it appeared to be a converted chapel: the ceiling had ornate wooden arches, painted a heavenly blue and carrying quotes from scripture, and his desk stood where an alter might have stood, on a raised platform that was barred off with a low, gilded cage. The file cases behind his desk and the modern-looking office stuff de-Christianized the room a little, but especially that partition wasn’t easy to overlook.

By the time Cesare came back to his office, Lucrezia had been there for ten minutes. In those ten minutes she had changed positions seven times: studying the ledgers in a low book case, leaning against the farthest wall and looking at her feet, leaning against a file case and then studying the files in the file case, standing in front of one of the narrow windows and tapping on the ironwork with one manicured nail – a dark cherry red –, sitting arrogantly in the chair behind his desk and – finally – sitting on top of the desk itself, with her back against the door and the letter lying to her right. She had her high-heeled sandals propped up on his desk chair and was still adjusting her skirt – a pleated skirt, much too short for a church environment, though its colour was a bishop’s magenta – when he arrived. She heard his footsteps in time and quickly sat still, so that it seemed she’d been in that very position for ages.

She didn’t turn or acknowledge his presence, because she wanted to see how he would react to her presence. After all, she hadn’t seen him since the football game, which had taken place two weeks earlier, and she had never been in his office before because he did not want her to come there. She had adhered to this desire without realizing it – after all, he always came to her, so it was never necessary to search him out.

Cesare, on his part, was not angry that she’d come today, but he was uncomfortable; in part because she’d barged in unannounced, and he liked it better when _he_ did that, and in part because he hadn’t seen her since the football game.

The internet, conversely, had seen them together continuously: the video of the kiss cam was all over it, and had even been published in some gossip magazines and tabloids before their father had had those taken down. Someone at the game had put two and two together, or rather, had put one and two together and come to the conclusion that both numbers came in very, _very_ close succession.

Cesare suspected that it had been Alfonso, and Lucrezia suspected it had been Sancía.

Neither Cesare nor Lucrezia was sure how they felt about any of this, and neither had decided whether they’d acted on impulse, calculation or nostalgia.

But they hadn’t seen each other for the longest time, and here she was, sitting in his office as if she did it every other day. Cesare approached her quietly, glad that he was wearing a suit that didn’t rustle when he walked. He stepped quietly onto the platform and stood behind her, almost breathing down on the back of her neck. She’d put her blonde hair up in a high bun and fastened it with a black velvet band, so that her neck was exposed. He remained behind her looking at the little baby hairs there, completely silent and enjoying that grey zone of non-action.

‘Chairs not good enough for you anymore, sister?’ He said at last, because he had to.

A little shock when through Lucrezia’s body even though she’d known he was there.

‘Haven’t seen you in a while,’ she said, turning her head to the side. He was too directly behind her to get a good look at him, which annoyed her. ‘I wonder, are you avoiding anyone, dear brother?’

‘Always. Which is why I tell people to stay away from my office,’ he replied.

‘Really? I thought you didn’t want to be disturbed in your holy work.’

He came closer and she became aware of his scent. She noticed a hint of smoke through his cologne. He didn’t usually smoke, and she wondered that anyone would do such a thing in a church.

‘True,’ he said slowly, so that the “u” stayed behind on her skin. ‘But that’s not the worst of it.’

‘What is?’ She asked.

He leaned further forward until his chin hovered closely over her shoulder and his lips were inches away from her ear. ‘People sitting on my holy work,’ he whispered.

Her eyes widened in shock, until she realized that she was, in fact, sitting on some paperwork. She started getting down from the desk, rather more to put some distance between them than to save whatever forms she was crushing. He’d foreseen this and walked quickly around the desk to prevent her from getting away. He stood in front of her and put his hands on either side of her legs to lock her in. She avoided looking at him, though he didn’t touch her or lean into her.

‘You might as well stay there now. The damage is already done,’ he said. He stared at the profile of her face, which was turned away from him.

He thought he knew why she’d come, but he didn’t want to bring it up himself. The risk that she was mad at him was still there; sometimes she needed a little time to get worked up, as if she were still deciding what exactly she was going to be mad about. He could be sure that it wouldn’t be the football game – no such directness from her. Directness was _dangerous_ , though he himself thought that both were necessary at times.

‘How’s father?’ He asked. The last time he’d seen his father, they’d had an enormous fight, and he couldn’t imagine that things had been extremely comfortable for her at home. He didn’t really _want_ things to be comfortable at home, because why should he be the only sibling to suffer?

Lucrezia didn’t know about the fight, but she understood the intent behind his question and in fact saw it as a golden ticket to taking control of the situation. ‘He’s busy. Actually, he would have come here himself, but he just has too much to do,’ she said, and finally turned her head to fix her eyes on her brother.

The first thing she noticed was that he wasn’t as near as she’d thought he would be, even though it had felt as if he were practically breathing down on her face. The second thing she noticed was that he’d cut his hair. He had lovely chestnut hair that would form waves when he let it grow past his ears, but now it didn’t: she could see the cross he had tattooed in the shell of his ear when he was in the army. It was a tattoo that Cesare regretted, but that their father regretted more. Rodrigo could frequently be heard to comment that it made his son look like a criminal rather than a man of God. Anyway, with his hair cut back, Cesare now had a head full of angelic brown curls. He’d matched it smartly with a warm grey suit, one of his more expensive ones. The third thing Lucrezia noticed, consequently, was that his collar was crooked. She longed to fix it and brush her hands past the stubble on his cheeks, but she flushed as soon as she realized it.

Cesare noticed that her gaze was fixed on his throat, but he thought it was because she didn’t want him to know the truth. ‘I see,’ he said slowly, even though he didn’t. ‘So you graciously offered to go in dad’s place.’ He made it sound a little crude, but in reality he was worried that his father had decided he didn’t want to see his son anymore, or that he didn’t know about Lucrezia’s visit and would be mad if he found out.

‘Yes. I told him you’d be more receptive if it was me,’ Lucrezia lied.

Cesare chuckled. ‘He lets other people do his yelling for him now?’

‘Yelling?’ Lucrezia repeated, frowning. ‘Why would he be yelling at you?’

He looked at her, taking her in, suspecting – rightfully so – that she wasn’t being sincere. He grinned shortly, and then leaned forward as if to share a secret. He thought that if she was so hell-bent on avoiding the topic of the football game, then she should be able to take some push-back.

‘I think,’ he said in her ear, ‘I did a bad thing.’ He let his head linger close to hers for a few seconds to get the point across, whatever that point was. Then he took his hands off the desk and started pulling back.

They were both surprised when she wrapped her hand around his wrist and put her other hand on his crooked collar, so that she could drag him back to the point where he’d lingered before, and beyond. He was surprised because he thought he’d gone too far with his crude and malicious remarks, and she was surprised because she never thought she had the character or capacity to surpass her brother in crudeness or maliciousness. She did, to be sure, but only Cesare sometimes seemed aware of that fact.

Now she pulled her brother to her without any sense of remorse for what she was going to do.

His hands landed on either side of her again, though now they firmly brushed her legs. His head was right in front of hers, so that she could see and measure the tiny green blot that disturbed the brown colour of his right eye and he could see the small scar she had in the middle of her left eyelid and had been there for as long as they could both remember.

This position Cesare ended up in was not one of his choosing, because her sudden movement had brought him off balance. He tried to move back a little when he regained his composure, startled by the sudden closeness. But she stubbornly kept her hands on his collar and he could smell the rosy cream she always wore, both of which took from him any and all desire to pull away. When next she parted her legs wide, revealing more desk and more thigh beneath her purple pleated skirt, he voluntarily leaned against the space in between.

‘I’m not here to yell at you,’ she told him, pretending to be breathless and succeeding so well in her acting that she even convinced her own body that it was, in fact, breathless.

He had to swallow before he could talk. ‘Then why are you here?’ he asked, after he had.

‘To make a hand delivery,’ she said.

Now Cesare’s eyes widened, and now it were his cheeks that flushed red when he understood what she truly meant: there was the important envelope, though in his defence, he never noticed it.

Lucrezia had blindly lifted the envelope that she’d put next to her on the desk and pressed it against his shirt. He put his hand on top of hers, but she wriggled her fingers loose and moved them back to his collar to stroke the stubble on his cheeks.

He caught the envelope before it slid down from his chest, but he didn’t bother opening it. He just put his hand back on the desk, intentionally positioning it against her leg now, and let the paper crumple between their skin.

He bowed his head forward and held it less than an inch away from hers. The tip of his nose touched her cheek but his lips still touched only air. He regretted this, but he was still waiting for her to pull back, or for himself to do so.

‘Don’t you want to know what’s in the envelope?’ She murmured against his skin.

‘No,’ he replied, using the very same breath of air. He could feel his groin pushing against his pants and the table rim and knew somewhere in his head that this was bad, that this was a monster from the past and a grotesque one at that. That half-baked awareness could not combat the heat that coursed through his body, though, and so it went away defeated.

She opened her mouth, either to say something or to extend an invitation. He did the same and leaned in further.

But before either of them could decide which one it would be, more words or an invitation or both, a male voice said: ‘Cesare, you’re still he- oh, I’m sorry.’

Cesare had already stepped back before Cardinal Andrea Ruggiero could finish the apology, so it wasn’t too bad, or so he thought. He couldn’t really think properly, except that he now regretted wearing a suit with flowing trousers and that the platform where he’d put up his desk was far too small.

Lucrezia quickly closed her legs, rearranged her skirt and then put her hands around the brim of the desk. She didn’t turn to greet the Cardinal but stared at an inscription on the wall instead, hoping that he wouldn’t recognize her from behind. They did not know each other well, but they had exchanged greetings and smiled politely at each other.

 _I don’t have my hair down, though, so maybe he won’t know it’s me_ , she thought.

Cesare thought the same thing.

Cardinal Ruggiero thought that he recognized the girl on the desk from somewhere, and wondered if Cesare had ever brought her in before. They somehow seemed like a pair to him, not recognizable separately but only in relation to each other, or indeed, in succession, like one and two or A and B. As of yet, the Cardinal had no idea how right he was about that.

‘I just wanted to say good night to you and Rover,’ Ruggiero said. He repositioned himself in the doorway to get a better look, but it didn’t yield a better view.

Cesare had forgotten about Cardinal Rover Catalano, who’d come up to the office along with him and Ruggiero earlier. He was ashamed that he had forgotten, but then, he’d also forgotten about his father and the football game and a lot of other things reason required him to remember.

‘Good, we’re – _I’m_ going home soon anyway,’ he said. He’d corrected himself because he didn’t want to imply that he would be going to the same house as Lucrezia, because that would somehow prove that they lived in the same house. Neither of those things were true, and his correction rather made it seem as if he would leave Lucrezia behind in the office, which would be odd.

Cardinal Ruggiero, old and foolish as he may be, had long picked up on the oddity of it and was still trying to place the girl. He wondered if he could ask the girl something and force her to turn around, but he wasn’t bold enough. ‘Okay, well, I’m heading home now. Have a good night, miss,’ he tried lamely, nodding to the girl’s back, and then to Cesare: ‘Borgia.’

Cesare nodded back stiffly and the Cardinal walked out of the office, unaware of how heavy was the fact of that last name in that room at that particular moment.

When he was gone, Lucrezia hopped off the desk and considered her brother, who stood motionless with his back to one of the file cases.

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ she said, apparently unaffected. She wasn’t, but it was important that she acted cool, or everything would have been in vain. Or rather, poorly motivated.

She picked up the crumpled envelope that had been left on the desk and handed it to Cesare, who accepted it meekly. ‘Jesus, Crezia, you’re killing me,’ he said hoarsely, though he’d tried to carry a lighter tone. ‘Just tell me what it says if it’s so damn important you had to hand deliver it. Or admit that it’s a bill from the gas company that you carried over just because you missed me.’ He regained some of his composure as he spoke and gave her a mocking smile after.

She ignored it and turned to walk to the door. She halted on the threshold. ‘If you _must_ know, brother,’ she said, tapping her cherry-coloured nails on the wooden panelling. ‘It’s an invitation.’

He frowned and looked down at the envelope, which was made, he noticed despite its battered state, from a rich creamy paper.

‘Father offered to pay for those,’ Lucrezia went on. ‘Well, that, and the wedding itself. He’s so sweet.’ She gave him a sugar-coated smile to underline her point, and then she left, not knowing that he had already ripped the wedding invitation to shreds before she reached the end of the hallway. Unlike her, he didn’t need time to consider what he was mad about.


	2. Part II: The Third Degree

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rodrigo stops by Cesare's office, after an outrageous accusation made by a certain Cardinal the night before.

Two days later, Cesare’s office suffered a second invasion, this time by a dangerous and particularly irate criminal going by the name of Rodrigo Borgia. It was lunch time and the Cathedral was closed until two o’clock, but neither Cesare nor Cardinal Rover Catalano had gone out to eat. Rover sat at Cesare’s desk – he _was_ the Cardinal, after all, so Cesare had graciously offered his boss the chair – combing through the accounts of the Cathedral that his predecessor had left him, while eating a sandwich that Cesare judged had boloney on it. Cesare had taken place behind an unimpressive desk that he’d used to store bottles of whiskey and cognac. He was reading the files of Cardinal Ruggiero’s court case when someone opened the door rather forcefully. It wasn’t exactly bursting through, but on the other hand, it _is_ customary to knock when entering an office, or at least peak around the door first – even if the office belongs to your very own son.

Rodrigo Borgia had a reason to be aggressive that day, though. In fact, it was such a good reason that he wasn’t even bothered by the unexpected presence of Cardinal Catalano.

‘Rodrigo!’ Rover said jovially. He put down his sandwich and regarded the man at the door with a stoic smile, as if he didn’t notice anything strange. Rodrigo looked neat as always, with his pepper-and-salt hear sleeked back, his dark coat made of the richest wool, his expensive pressed suit, his gloves, shoes and bag all made of leather and his scarf an impeccable white to match the white detailing on his coat. Yet Rover had noticed the energetic entrance and the deep creases in Rodrigo’s forehead. Most of all, he’d been a guest at Rodrigo’s house the day before and felt the strangest tension at the dinner table.

‘Rover, how are you,’ Rodrigo asked the Cardinal, as he closed the door behind him (granted, he handled it with considerably more gentleness than with his entrance).

‘I am just fine, my friend. What brings you to Saint Augustine’s today?’ Rover asked.

Cesare, meanwhile, looked rather stricken, but in a good way: he hadn’t expected his father to drop by, and since it was lunch hour he thought Rodrigo might have come to take him out. He thought it might signify the end of their cold war – for Cesare had not seen his father since the day after the football game, and that meeting hadn’t been a good one.

‘I’m here on business. I wanted to go over something with my son,’ Rodrigo said, so curtly that it crushed any hopes Cesare had for the visit to be in the spirit of rapprochement.

Because he did not wish a repetition of the last meeting, he cleared his throat and said demurely: ‘I see. We can go to the conference hall.’

‘Nonsense! I have occupied your office for long enough, I should think. I’ll just go back to my own and finish this sandwich,’ Rover said. He stood up and gathered his papers. ‘Come to me later, will you, son?’ He told Cesare.

Cesare nodded and watched Rover step down from the platform his desk stood on.

‘Don’t give him too much to do, Rodrigo. We wouldn’t want Cesare here to skip out on church service,’ Rover said to Rodrigo, but he winked at Cesare to show that he was kidding. Cesare rarely attended service, as they both knew.

‘Your Eminence,’ Rodrigo said, and he gave the Cardinal a pleasant smile.

Then the Cardinal took his leave, and father and son were left alone.

‘Is this about Ruggiero’s case?’ Cesare asked.

That earned him an intense look he didn’t know how to interpret. Then Rodrigo turned around, put his briefcase on the floor beside the coat stand and started taking off his coat, scarf and gloves.

‘I suppose it is about Ruggiero’s case, yes,’ he said.

‘He’s supposed to come by here tomorrow morning,’ Cesare said. He picked up the files he’d been reading and transferred them to his own desk, so he could continue working there. ‘I’m sure Rover wouldn’t mind if you joined us. I _know_ that Ruggiero won’t mind,’ Cesare went on. He was standing behind his desk now, leaning on it with his hands and looking at his father.

Rodrigo walked up to the platform but didn’t ascend it. Instead he stood looking up at his son, with his hands clasped in front of his stomach. Cesare noticed that he’d left his briefcase behind at the door.

‘No need. I spoke to Cardinal Ruggiero last night,’ Rodrigo said.

Cesare frowned. ‘Did something happen? Rover didn’t mention anything today.’

‘No. We just had dinner, with the whole family.’

This was hardly true, since Cesare had not been there; but then it was meant to be a provocation. Cesare heard the insult and was duly insulted, but he thought it smarter to let it pass.

Rodrigo continued looking at his son, expecting more of a reaction. When he didn’t get it, he said: ‘Your sister was here the other day.’ He didn’t sound unsure, even though he hoped he was wrong.

‘Ah,’ Cesare breathed, promptly reminded of their last meeting. ‘So this is _not_ business.’

‘Oh, unfortunately it is,’ Rodrigo said. ‘You see, Cardinal Ruggiero was surprised when Lucrezia and Alfonso joined us at the dinner table and told him of their big wedding plans. He was so surprised, in fact, that he sat me down after dinner and told me that he had seen a girl just like her in your office, earlier this week.’ He paused to see Cesare’s reaction, but Cesare smartly kept his face neutral.

‘The Cardinal then made me a business proposal: I am to direct my efforts to getting him out of his legal ordeal, and in exchange he will get Lucrezia a nice, forgettable wedding gift instead of a bad, unforgettable one,’ Rodrigo added, without elaborating on what exactly the Cardinal had seen.

Cesare stared at his father, who was madly squinting his eyes at him. He wasn’t sure what kind of a reaction his father hoped for, but he knew he should not laugh – laughing would be very bad, obviously. And yet, seeing the stern face of his father and imagining old Cardinal Ruggiero trying to extort the latter was hopelessly comical. Cesare snorted and then laughed openly, so that tears formed in the corners of his eyes. ‘Emotional blackmail?’ he asked, still laughing. ‘ _Really_.’

His father was decidedly unhappy with that display. ‘That’s your response?’ He asked, his eyes dark and his voice dangerous. A three-year-old would have promptly burst out crying.

But Cesare was no three-year old. ‘Cardinal Ruggiero has an overactive imagination, and a dirty mind. It’s always the priests that are the worst,’ he scoffed.

‘I will not have you speak like that!’ Rodrigo chided his son, wagging his finger. Then he went on: ‘Cardinal Ruggiero is an idiot, and idiots don’t have much of an imagination. If they did, Ruggiero wouldn’t be on trial for a crime so old everyone involved is dead.’

Cesare sighed and crossed his arms in front of his chest. ‘That just makes him old, not an idiot,’ he said. ‘And to give him creativity points, he surpassed all lawyers and priests and went straight to the CIA’s Vatican branch to solve his little ordeal for him.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘ _Emotional blackmail._ Good God.’ He laughed again, though it would have been better if he hadn’t.

He didn’t do it because he truly thought it was funny, though, but out of extreme nervousness. After all, Cesare was well aware of the allegation the Cardinal had made against him and his sister, and even worse, he knew that it was true. This had kept him from properly responding to his father’s implications, or to be aware of the building anger and fear that lay underneath it.

But Rodrigo had had enough now.

‘Yes, God!’ He shouted, and stepped onto the platform so he could face his son directly on the other side of the desk. Like a mad prophet, or a hellish friar such as that Florentine friar Girolamo Savonarola, he bellowed: ‘ _God_ have mercy, Cesare, God have mercy on you and on this entire family if I have to- if I have to protect you and that despicable- _He_ came into _my_ house, told me that he caught _my_ children practically having sex in a Cathedral and that he now expects _me_ to get him out of a prison sentence that is all but a done deal! You can snigger all you want, Cesare, but don’t think I will not exchange you for him in a heartbeat and let you rot in prison for the rest of eternity if I discover that there is any truth to any of what he said, as God is my witness!’

Even Cesare, the cynic – and cynics are rarely truly religious – was intimidated and overwhelmed by this speech. ‘There isn’t, and you’re out of your mind to think otherwise,’ he said as calmly as he could manage. To his surprise, the moment the words left his mouth he found that he rather believed in them, that he truly felt the indignation he feigned, through the sheer force of his hypocrisy.

‘So your sister wasn’t here?’ Rodrigo asked.

‘She was, but-’

‘But _what_?’ Rodrigo interrupted.

‘ _But_ she’s not the girl the Cardinal is talking about. I had a girl over in the late evening. Lucrezia was here earlier,’ Cesare lied. It wasn’t a full lie, since he had spent some late evenings with that girl. Not the evening they were talking about, though.

Not that Cesare was concerned about the gravity of his lies: he would have said anything, but simply because it was a choice between two evils and lying was, from any vantage point, the lesser one. If his father was willing to admit to what had repeatedly been put in front of him, he would likely agree.

‘Who was it?’ Rodrigo asked, suspicious.

‘Alice,’ Cesare said.

‘I don’t know Alice.’

‘You do, she’s on the legal team making the case against Ruggiero.’

Rodrigo kept eyeing his son with the same suspicion. It made Cesare uneasy at first, but then it brought back the indignation his hypocrisy had birthed: after all, Cesare _did_ know a girl named Alice, _intimately,_ and his father stood here apparently willing to believe that an intimate relationship with his sister was more likely. Granted, it was true, but Rodrigo didn’t have much concrete evidence to support that belief, or, shall we say, assumption. So what did that say about Rodrigo’s assumptions about his son, his own son? Wasn’t that an outrageous thing?

‘You’re seriously still considering the idea that I might have slept with my own sister, on account of that blind cow of a Ruggiero?’ Cesare cried out, with all the divine righteousness of the same mad prophet that resounded in Rodrigo’s accusations.

Rodrigo scowled. ‘On account of more than that, as you know very well,’ he said, but he kept his voice low for the shame of it. He looked away from Cesare and focused on the walls instead. He noticed the absence of any crosses and thought for the first time that that was a good thing: perhaps God had looked away.

He fixed his eyes on his son again. ‘You don’t deny that she was here,’ he said in a cold, monotonous tone of voice.

This further infuriated Cesare. ‘Through no fault of my own, so you don’t have to look at me like that! She literally barged in while I was in a meeting, dad. How was I supposed to know she’d do that?’ He said, wildly throwing his hands up in the air. He pressed his lips together and looked at his father. He bent over the desk to make sure Rodrigo would see the look in his eyes. ‘I never went to see her once. _I obeyed you_ , father,’ he said, with all the force of a man telling a single truth after spinning a web of shameless lies.

Rodrigo held his son’s intense gaze for a long time, considering his sincerity and weighing his own thoughts. He wanted to believe Cesare and almost thought it perverse not to. Indeed, even the suspicion that it might all be true was more than he could bear.

And to think that he’d been forced to sit and listen to Ruggiero the day before, who’d been trying to tell Rodrigo of the essence of perversion as if Rodrigo were his confessor and he needed his confessor’s absolution! Yet at the end of the story it had been the confessor himself, Rodrigo Borgia, who’d been expected to repent, and that, too, was unbearable.

Rodrigo decided then – though in truth, one might say he’d decided it long ago – that it would be better to believe his son, though he could not take the perverseness off his mind and the pain from his heart.

Like his daughter was wont to do, he searched for something else to be mad about. ‘Have I taught you nothing about making excuses?’ He said to Cesare. ‘I don’t care that you didn’t know, that she came to you. Kings, gamblers, children and Cardinal Ruggiero may leave things up to chance, but not us, Cesare, never us! It is weak.’

Cesare, feeling that again he was getting the bottom of the barrel for no good reason, retaliated the way sons often retaliate against their fathers. ‘Yeah? Then maybe next time, instead of assuming that I’m the criminal in need of a speech and some discipline, you should tell your daughter the same things you tell your son,’ he hissed.

Rodrigo stared at Cesare as if the latter had slapped him. Then he shook his head and turned his back to Cesare, rubbing the bridge of his nose. ‘I _did_ ,’ he said.

Cesare was taken aback by this, but mostly because it made him realize that much of his anger was pointed at the wrong person. He resented the fact that his father had come to him, when he knew that he would not give Lucrezia the same lecture when he got home – even if he had given her the same orders as he’d received himself. He also suspected that his father had done that in the kindest way possible, whereas Rodrigo had nearly given Cesare a right hook the day after the football game.

But Lucrezia was also to blame. She was the one always playing with fire but never getting burned. At the end of the day, she would point the accusing finger to him. _You cuddled me, you cornered me, you kissed me_ , she would say. To say nothing of the letter: she’d come into Cesare’s office to figuratively and literally heat him up, only to throw a bucket of ice water on top of it and leave.

Lucrezia, for her part, simply thought that Cesare had reaped what he had sown during the football game. Cesare did not agree with that viewpoint because there had been other things before that. So in a way, they were in agreement: their history was endless, as was their guilt.

Both resigned and embittered, Cesare said to his father’s back: ‘She just came to drop something off, then she left. That was all. Cardinal Ruggiero must have seen the stupid video of the football game and thought he could make such an outrageous accusation as this’ – he could not get himself to be more specific than that – ‘stick. Obviously he was right about that. Not your usual political finesse, dad.’

His father ignored the insult. ‘What did she drop off?’ He asked, and turned around again to face his son. His brown eyes were sparkling obsessively.

‘What?’ Cesare asked, though he knew precisely _what._

‘What did she drop off?’

Cesare tried to look as if he thought it was a stupid question that he hardly even knew the answer to, but he had to answer it even so. ‘A wedding invitation,’ he admitted. He was not successful in sounding neutral, and was aware of that himself. It irritated him so much that he said with all the gall that he could muster: ‘Apparently the date was brought forward. I’m assuming that’s a consequence of your humble suggestion, father.’

‘I’m paying for the wedding, the least I can do is decide when it happens,’ Rodrigo replied sharply.

‘Yes, I’m sure that was all there was to it.’

It was only mumbled commentary, but if it’s mumbled one should never give the commentary at all or face the consequences.

‘You got a problem with it, Cesare?’ Rodrigo said dangerously.

But Cesare had not just gone to so much trouble to convince his father only to let something slip now, even if the subject of the wedding had hit a nerve. ‘Not at all, dad. I’m happy for them,’ he lied.

‘Hmm, I’m sure you are,’ Rodrigo said, with a great deal of sarcasm in his tone. ‘Maybe next time you go to a football game together, you can kiss Alfonso instead of your sister, and show him some of that happiness that I’m sure you have in spades.’

Cesare thought this a remarkably saucy suggestion, but was wise enough to leave that unsaid. ‘Is that an order, father?’ He asked. He gave his father the cold, stony expression that Rodrigo had taught him.

‘Don’t tempt me,’ Rodrigo said, and pointed his finger at Cesare’s face. Then he turned and stepped off the platform to leave. ‘You’re uninvited, by the way,’ he said, before he went to the coat stand to retrieve his coat and scarf.

‘Excuse me?’

‘To the wedding reception, and maybe the wedding,’ Rodrigo explained, as he wrapped the white scarf around his neck. ‘I don’t want you anywhere near your sister until I’ve made this thing with Cardinal Ruggiero go away. So _you_ stay away.’ He picked up his briefcase and went to the door, only pausing to say: ‘In case you’re not sure: _that_ was an order.’

Then he left, neglecting to say goodbye. Borgias aren’t the kind of people to walk out of a room with the appropriate social decorum, anyway. That way you never _really_ leave a room. Cesare, for one, was sure to be aware of this, because for the next few days, his office would be crowded by the words of his father while the smell of his sister’s perfume lingered around his desk.


	3. Part III: The Villain's Den

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cesare is summoned to the house and finds his father and sister there with a sly plan for Cardinal Ruggiero. Cesare doesn't like that Lucrezia is involved and tries to get her to drop the issue by telling her some harsh truths.

Almost two weeks went by before Cesare heard from his father and sister again. He obeyed his father and made no attempt to reach out, but less out of a sense of duty than the knowledge that it wouldn’t do much good. He wanted to see his sister, of course, but he had enough self-reflection to realize that his motives to do so were confused and tended to shift depending on his mood. Seeing as he’d only barely convinced his father that Cardinal Ruggiero had lied about what he’d seen, he didn’t think it would be clever to cause a scene by talking to Lucrezia. So there wasn’t much to do except continuing to work on Ruggiero’s case, almost as if nothing had happened; to keep a calm face on the outside while on the inside Cesare was boiling with anger he didn’t know where to vent and tension he didn’t know how to erase.

Lucrezia, contrarily, spent those two weeks in relative comfort: she had driven a little closely past the edge when she’d visited Cesare, she was willing to admit that, but she felt satisfied with the way things had gone in his office. She’d come out of that match victorious, after all. She didn’t stop to consider what match they were playing, nor why it was important to win – though if she had, she would probably think of it as healthy sibling rivalry. Well, perhaps not entirely _healthy,_ but they were fighting without much cause and there were lots of siblings that did that.

Of course she wasn’t oblivious to what that “match” – and that victory – had cost: her father had told her of Cardinal Ruggiero’s threats. Despite Cesare’s accusations, Rodrigo had berated her like he had his son, even if his words had been considerably harsher to Cesare. He’d come into his daughter’s room looking like a sad puppy and unable to start a sentence. She’d immediately guessed what was wrong.

‘I want him to come to the wedding, dad,’ she said, to spare him the trouble of asking.

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ he replied.

‘Why not? He’s my brother,’ she said, though that was a risk.

Rodrigo squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his hand against his mouth.

‘I explained to you about the football game. It was a heat-of-the-moment thing. Everyone felt awkward and confused, and Cesare just thought it was funny. He meant it as a joke,’ Lucrezia explained again.

Rodrigo opened his eyes again and looked at her uncertainly.

‘A terrible joke, obviously, but you know how he is,’ Lucrezia said, when she saw. ‘Look, if I don’t hold it against him, and if Alfonso doesn’t hold it against him’ (he did) ‘then why should you?’

Rodrigo had a couple of reasons, but most of them were little more than distant memories, little things that he had no desire to put into words. Or into thoughts, for that matter. He knew like no other how thin was the barrier between thinking something and knowing it.

‘You shouldn’t have gone to see him. I told you not to,’ he told Lucrezia, and that was as stern as he was going to get with her.

‘I’m sorry, dad. I didn’t think anything of it,’ she said. ‘Did something happen?’

Then he’d told her about Ruggiero, and she’d given him the perfect mixture of outrage and embarrassment – of the topic, not the event itself, to be sure. She’d told him that _of course_ it hadn’t been her, the cardinal must have confused her with someone else. After all, didn’t her father know that Cesare was not the most godly man, and far from celibate? It had probably been Sancia in his office.

Rodrigo hadn’t liked to hear that particular suggestion, but of course it was better if Cesare had tried to kiss Alfonso’s sister instead of his own. So he’d just left after that, feeling that he’d done his job and in no way aware of the contrast between how he’d treated his son and how he’d treated his daughter.

It’s not that he went easier on Lucrezia because he loved her more than he did Cesare: Rodrigo liked to think that he had an infinite amount of love to divide among his children, and he wasn’t entirely wrong about that. But he (erroneously) thought that Lucrezia was better disciplined and less capricious by nature than her brother. This he did not base on her behaviour – in truth, both siblings were capricious and undisciplined, and both were fairly good at hiding it and fitting themselves in the well-oiled machine that was their family (their recent mishap with the cardinal being an unfortunate exception). He based it on the fact that Lucrezia was his only daughter, and fathers always let their daughters get away with more than they would their sons because they think the former are more exposed to the mercilessness of the world and therefore fragile or less resilient. A theory the evidence does not support, but that is beside the point.

An additional factor for Rodrigo’s differential treatment of his children was that Lucrezia lived safely entrenched in the academic realm, whereas Cesare lived in the same world as Rodrigo did. A world which his son navigated in a distinctly unforgiving and unscrupulous way, as Rodrigo did.

It _is_ hard for most parents to look at their children and see a younger version of themselves looking back, like a living, breathing human mirror.

So Lucrezia knew of what had passed between her father and the cardinal, and since her brother had not come by the house, it was safe to assume that he’d borne the brunt of Rodrigo’s criticism.

Perhaps because she’d been spared a nasty fight, the whole incident intrigued her more than it angered her. It never occurred to her to feel embarrassed. She didn’t care about what the old cardinal thought, she was certain that her father would believe whatever she told him and if Cesare was cooking in his own juices right now as a consequence for their little tussle, then frankly, it couldn’t have played out any better.

Of course part of the reason that she was so calm about it, was because no one outside of them four knew about what had happened – which, by the way, was technically _nothing._ They hadn’t even kissed. Why then would Lucrezia bother to tell Alfonso? It would only increase the animosity between Alfonso and her brother, when everything was finally going smoothly. If Alfonso found out, he might try to keep Cesare from their wedding, and if her father agreed to that there would be nothing for her to do but accept their judgement. She had had very few doubts about her wedding so far, but if Cesare was barred form it she thought she might just call it off.

Alfonso, for his part, never asked why Rodrigo was constantly in a foul mood or why Cesare never came by anymore, while Cesare had previously seized every opportunity to visit the house (or, in Alfonso’s opinion, Lucrezia’s room). Alfonso didn’t ask partly because he attributed these things to the football game controversy, and partly because he wasn’t at all opposed to Cesare’s absence – so why bring it up? He had Lucrezia all to himself now, and he was surprised at the difference it made. Since the football game, Alfonso had made it his priority to dote on her, his attempts not thwarted for once by that dark-haired Borgia prince. He was so glad about this, in fact, that he didn’t mind or didn’t notice that Lucrezia responded to him in the exact same way as before, obviously taking him and his attention for granted. It didn’t matter: Alfonso was satisfied.

It is dangerous to be satisfied, though, particularly in a relationship like theirs. Alfonso’s easy contentment was diametrically opposed to Lucrezia’s aforementioned capriciousness, and to an extent this also prevented him from noticing the latter. He never knew that when Lucrezia said she was busy working on an essay for her diplomatic history course (and could not therefore spend her time on flower arrangements or choosing the songs she wanted to hear at the wedding feast), she was in fact working on Ruggiero’s case. Unlike her brother, however, who was also working on Ruggiero’s case, Lucrezia was working _against_ the cardinal. She’d sneaked into her father’s office on several occasions to peek into his files about Ruggiero.

Her father never explicitly forbade his daughter from working on the case, though he’d ordered her to stay away from “this business” (mostly meaning Cesare) and focus on the wedding preparations.

Lucrezia _wanted_ a beautiful wedding, of course, but that didn’t obscure the fact that most of the preparations were dull tasks that served no purpose other than satisfying her sense of aesthetic. Conversely, solving the Ruggiero-ordeal served many purposes and was thus much more satisfying: securing her father’s career, safe-guarding her family’s social standing, getting even, showing off. Working towards all this without anyone knowing was especially exciting too, to say nothing of the immense satisfaction she would get from actually achieving something. Why waste time on wedding preparations when she had the prospect of saving her entire family’s reputation and livelihood? Why pass up an opportunity to frustrate Cesare, simply by doing something he could and should have done?

According to this specific line of reasoning, there was actually a lot at stake for Lucrezia: it was her chance to prove that Cesare wasn’t the only one who knew how to “navigate” the political realm, and that he wasn’t the only one who could be unscrupulous in that respect – and in other respects. The kiss cam had been unscrupulous, for one; how he’d made puppets of her and everyone else in that stadium and laughed about it. Though what bothered her most was that she’d leaned in herself, and that that might have been the real reason he’d smirked. As if she would get up and tell Alfonso to pack his bags, as if that was all it took. A goddamn kiss cam. The American treatment, sibling edition.

So all things considered, Lucrezia’s feelings and motives towards her brother were just as confused as Cesare’s feelings and motives towards his sister, and that was an important reason for her not to reach out to him in those two weeks. Instead, she drowned herself in her secret project, spurred on by a bittersweet taste of victory in her past, present and future.

When she finally had something to present, she went to her father and not her brother, even though she longed to see the perplexed look on the latter’s face. She didn’t exactly “crack the code”: content-wise, there was not much she, a college student, could come up with that her father, who worked for the CIA, could not: she lived a teen drama of sorts, but not that kind of teen drama.

Still, Rodrigo had made little progress, and it could be said that she helped him change push the reset button. For while Rodrigo had been caught up in disproving Ruggiero’s accusations, worried as he was that there _was_ truth to what the cardinal had said, Lucrezia had moved away from this defensive strategy. She was the one who suggested they should make a statement and try to send Ruggiero to prison. After all, he was already on trial: he was perfectly placed to go to prison, wasn’t he?

It was this epiphany, brought on by Lucrezia but carried by Rodrigo, that brought Cesare to the house, two weeks after he’d last spoken to his father and his sister.

He came when his father summoned him, without many good or bad expectations but wearing a pitch-black suit and a pressed cherry red shirt fit for a funeral. He’d hoped to look around the house and search for his sister before going to his father’s office: not because he thought it was a good idea but because he was like a magnet being pulled to a steel surface. But Rodrigo himself opened the front door.

‘Dad,’ Cesare said demurely. He’d made a promise to himself to be a good, obedient son, no slip-ups tonight even if his father got angry.

But Rodrigo showed his son a bright smile before pulling him inside the house and giving him an affectionate hug. Cesare didn’t do a good job of hiding his surprise at this, but Rodrigo just smiled more when he saw and turned to lead them both to his office.

It was not a large room, but it had a ceiling that was up in the clouds: the office had been an addition to the house and so was built past the second floor. It was distinctly modern and blindingly white, the exact opposite of the mostly wooden and antique offices in the Church of Saint Augustine. The walls were an uninterrupted powdery white; the ceiling was also white, very much like clouds indeed; with several artsy-looking lamps suspended from the ceiling that gave off an electric blue light. The wall opposite the doorway had tall French windows with transparent white curtains. It was dazzling to look at, though the most wonderful thing by far was to look down at the floor and see the intricate mosaic tiles in several shades of white, grey and blue. Perhaps because people tended to get distracted by it and stare at their feet, there was a soft, steel-coloured rug placed beneath Rodrigo’s desk, which with its mahogany wood was the only dark object in the room. The rest of the furniture – the enormous bookcase, smaller side tables, the two fauteuils and even the little trinkets such a study inevitably gathers over time – was all in a shade that ranged from white to light blue.

Rodrigo went to a cabinet that was positioned between the two French windows and produced two glasses of Lepanto brandy, his drink of choice. Not Cesare’s, but he took it without comment.

‘I’ve given some thought to our predicament,’ Rodrigo said, once he’d seated himself behind his great mahogany desk. Cesare sat in one of the white fauteuils, staring at the mosaic tiles beyond the steel-coloured rug. Cesare was only mildly surprised that his was about Ruggiero, and was glad that it looked to be more of a business conversation than it had been last time.

‘You expressed the opinion that Ruggiero was smart to go straight to the CIA. After all, who would have thought to do that? Who would be so daring?’ Rodrigo said, swirling his drink around in his glass like he was trying to look like Don Corleone.

‘Only a desperate man,’ Cesare said.

‘Yes!’ Rodrigo said, as if he were a teacher and Cesare had solved the most difficult answer on his test. He even spoke in a lecturing kind of way, which annoyed Cesare, who had no desire to be schooled. ‘And Ruggiero is desperate. Which is why he never thought to bring strong leverage. There’s the video of the football game, of course, but it doesn’t serve as evidence for anything. Because there _is_ no evidence.’ Rodrigo swirled his drink again and again and again, but never drunk from it. Neither did Cesare, who had put his drink on the desk.

‘There’s nothing,’ Rodrigo repeated, as the liquor swirled. He stared at his son, who avoided his eyes either on purpose or not. ‘Are you listening, Cesare? There _is_ nothing, right? Look at me.’

Cesare snapped his head up and looked at his father. ‘No, there is nothing!’ He barked. ‘And this is the last time I’m saying it. Ruggiero’s claims are unfounded beyond the video of the football game, and that was just…’ He searched for the right word. ‘Dumb’ was all he could come up with, which seemed anticlimactic.

‘Yes, it was,’ Rodrigo said sharply. Then he finally stayed his hand and brought his glass to his lips. The brandy went down as smoothly as always, leaving a pleasant trail of fire in his throat and stomach. Liquid sunshine, right from Spain, he liked to say.

‘That video is a pesky little thing. We will have to think of a way to make that go away,’ he murmured.

‘We can’t,’ Cesare said immediately, and when his father frowned he explained: ‘It’s the internet, nothing ever leaves the internet.’

Rodrigo narrowed his eyes, considering this. He figured his son was probably right: even though he’d had the kiss cam video removed from the official web sites – most of them had done it without too much commentary, but with the gossip tabloids he’d been forced to threaten legal sanctions. This had been embarrassing, since he had to imply that the content was pornographic and illegal and point out the incestuous nature of the video to prove this point – but the thing had been liked, shared, photo-screened and probably even printed to stick on mood boards or in pervert’s scrap journals.

He sighed and said: ‘Alright, we’ll think of something later. The important thing is that there is no truth to what the cardinal says’ – he eyed Cesare again, but didn’t linger on the issue this time – ‘which means that his leverage is useless unless he knows how to wield it. Which I’m willing to bet, he doesn’t. So he has placed himself utterly in our hands.’ He tapped the index finger of his drink-free hand on his desk and grinned at his son. ‘His move _was_ a desperate one, Cesare. Who would he have told about going to the CIA? And who could guess that he would? No one, and he cannot tell a soul since he’s on trial for conspiracy and fraud.’

Cesare nodded. ‘So he’s off our backs.’ He was aware of how little that made him feel, but didn’t know why he should be so apathetic. Surely he should be happier than anyone, since he’d been the one knocked all the way down to the base of Rodrigo’s mighty family pyramid for his “offenses”.

‘More than that,’ Rodrigo said. ‘We are all that have helped him keep his head above water. He may not realize the full extent of our help, but we have a hand in his trial, as you know yourself.’

‘And you intend to let him drown?’

Rodrigo grinned slyly. ‘Oh, no. I intend to drown him. I’m going to play his game but play it better, and make sure that he goes to prison.’ He said it with such vindictiveness that one might think he was some criminal mastermind.

Although Cesare was not opposed to doing things that might be considered morally or legally ambiguous, he wasn’t at all pleased by his father’s idea, and he said so without hiding his dismay. ‘Prison? You can’t. He’ll tell everyone who will listen about what he saw,’ he said, quickly followed by: ‘I mean in a general sense’, when he realized that both he and his father were now thinking about Lucrezia and Cesare in his office, with Cardinal Ruggiero looking at them from the doorway.

Cesare shook his head. ‘He’ll confess to everything he knows, dad. Don’t forget that we are guilty of some things, and that he knows it. CIA or no, we’re not untouchable. Even if he was wrong about me and Lucrezia.’

Rodrigo shrugged. He’d already thought about this. ‘We have to make sure he doesn’t tell on us. We have to make him willing to go to prison, so to speak.’ He took a sip from his prized liquor again, looking at Cesare over the rim of the glass.

‘And how do you propose to do that?’ Cesare asked. ‘Going to prison is the one thing he’s been trying to prevent. That’s why he’s doing all this.’

‘Yes, but he had us on his side. Now he doesn’t. After coming into _my_ house and insulting _my_ family while I’ve been trying to help him…’ Rodrigo tapped his index finger on the desk again, so hard that Cesare thought it might break in two.

‘That’s big talk, dad, but how are you going to do it?’ He asked, annoyed. He didn’t like it when his father was angry and authoritarian, passing out orders lefty and right, but this wishful thinking wasn’t like to get them anywhere either.

‘We,’ Rodrigo said. ‘How are _we_ going to do it. This will be a joint operation, Cesare, it must be. What did the Church do after Luther put up his 95 principles on the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg?’

Cesare blinked. ‘What?’

‘The _Reformation_. What did the Church do?’

Cesare stared at his father but only got a hard stare in return. He cleared his throat. ‘If I remember my papal history correctly, three or four successive popes basically hoped the problem would go away on its own until the Reformation was unstoppable and threatened the existence of the Catholic Church.’

That answer had been too elaborate, and Rodrigo flicked his hand in the air impatiently. After all, people who ask unnuanced questions generally expect unnuanced answers. ‘Yes, yes, but when it rose _above_ that, what was the Church’s _reaction_ to the Reformation?’ He asked.

Cesare almost rolled his eyes but stopped himself in time. ‘The Counter-Reformation?’ he tried.

He’d been largely sarcastic, but Rodrigo exclaimed: ‘Precisely!’ prodding the desk with his finger again. ‘That is what we – this family – is going to do. Launch a Counter-Reformation. Bigger and better. If Ruggiero thinks he can threaten us with this perverse, scandalous lie that he calls leverage, then we will show him what true leverage, true _scandal_ looks like. One week from now and we’ll have him crawling into prison of his own volition.’

Cesare listened to his Father blurting out his soulful one-liners with all the _we’s_ and the _us’s_ and found it hard not to scoff. He hadn’t heard those pronouns a lot in the past few weeks, let alone the word _family_. Instead, he’d been staring himself blind on Ruggiero’s files, focussing on all the things that would _not_ make the man go to prison. Because he _didn’t want to_.

‘Again, that’s a strong statement,’ he told his father. ‘Where are you going to get this leverage?’

‘First of all, you,’ Rodrigo answered. ‘You and Rover have been working on Ruggiero’s case, so that means you know what will hurt him. Secondly, me. I have the manpower.’ He must have seen the sceptical look on Cesare’s face, because he added: ‘You do realize the extent of our resources.’

Cesare did, but he hardly thought the CIA would appreciate Rodrigo poking an old bear like Ruggiero, particularly when the bear held sensitive information that might put the government in an embarrassing position.

‘But surely the CIA does not want you to-’ He started, but Rodrigo had seen it coming and interrupted him: ‘I decide what the CIA wants when it comes to the Vatican,’ he said.

‘Still,’ Cesare tried again. ‘Assuming that we find this leverage on Ruggiero, why not just use it to make him drop his claims? Why go to the trouble of putting him in prison? Even if you can make it happen, it will seem as if we’re not to be trusted. Considering the importance of our informal and underground networks, that’s a problem.’ He leaned forward in his chair to lean on the desk. He had to move the glass of brandy to do it, and the dragging glass made a heavy sound on the wooden surface of the desk. Rodrigo followed the thing with his eyes. ‘This sets a precedent, father,’ Cesare said, and Rodrigo’s eyes flicked back to his son.

‘Yes, Cesare, it does,’ he said slowly. ‘It shows the world that you don’t fuck with the Borgias.’ He wasn’t one for swearing, but when he did he had to admit it felt good.

Cesare could see from the intense look in his father’s eyes that it didn’t matter what he thought of the plan, and that he had little choice but to comply. ‘What do you want me to do?’ He asked, resigning himself yet again to the new order of things.

Rodrigo leaned back in his chair again. ‘Give that Alice of yours a call and see if she can do you a few favours. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem, should it?’

Actually, Cesare thought it might be a tough job. Alice wasn’t about to give him her files because they’d slept together; if he asked for their dirt on Ruggiero she’d assume that he’d use it to undercut them. Might be he had to explain about Ruggiero’s claims, even though his father would hate it if he did that. Cesare nodded even so: his father didn’t need to know everything.

‘I’m also going to reach out to some of my contacts, to get things rolling. I’ll let you and your sister know when I have something,’ Rodrigo went on. He reached out to pick up his cell phone, but seemed to remember something as he did it. ‘Actually, I could come by your office tomorrow for lunch,’ he said.

Cesare would have been overjoyed in most circumstances, but now he could only think of something else his father had said. In the absence of a quick reaction, Rodrigo said: ‘Well, we’ll talk tomorrow, then,’ and he started tapping on the screen of his phone.

Cesare stood up but lingered at his father’s desk.

Rodrigo looked at his son with raised eyebrows.

‘What about Lucrezia?’ Cesare asked, after deciding that he had to ask even at the risk of ruining the reconciliation between him and his father. ‘Is she going to be involved in this Counter-Reformation?’

His father rolled his head around on his neck and lowered his phone, which he’d already pressed against his ear. ‘Don’t start now, Cesare,’ he warned.

‘I’m not starting anything. I just don’t think-’

‘I know what you’re thinking, and I’m telling you that she’ll be fine,’ Rodrigo cut him off, and put the phone against his ear again.

‘Doesn’t she have enough on her plate?’ Cesare persisted. ‘Dad, she’s doing two full-time studies already, and she’s only twenty years old. And even if her teachers are going to be pleased by these extracurricular activities, I doubt her fiancé will be. Last time I checked, she has a wedding to prepare for.’

Rodrigo seemed to be focusing on the phone, which Cesare could faintly hear ringing. When Cesare kept standing there and no one picked up the phone on the other end of the line, Rodrigo sighed and resigned himself to the situation. He pressed away whoever he’d been trying to reach and put the phone down in front of him. ‘What is your concern exactly? That she’ll be overworked, or that her husband will find out about Ruggiero’s accusations and blame you for it?’ He asked, his voice sharp. He would have thought Cesare’s concern for his sister endearing in other circumstances, but now it was just suspicious.

Rodrigo distinctly noticed this reaction and wondered if that suspicion would fade with time. He hoped it would, for the sake of the entire family.

He had misunderstood Cesare’s intentions, however, for Cesare had not given much thought to Alfonso’s involvement in this drama at all. In fact, he’d assumed that someone would have told Alfonso, seeing as Rodrigo and Lucrezia liked to treat him as a full-fledged family member. But perhaps his father hadn’t told Alfonso because there were really two families in Rodrigo’s mind, and Alfonso only belonged to the sunny, picture-perfect family smiling at you from the family photos in the hallway. The other family was just a shameful mess of individuals that had been tucked away in a dusty shoebox at the back of a closet, in the hope no one – certainly not Alfonso – would pull a Pandora by opening it and releasing the hell inside. Maybe Lucrezia saw these two sides as well; or she felt guilty about what had happened. Or she just didn’t think the event was important enough to relate. _Much more interesting to talk about the weather during family dinner, or about cake tasting for the wedding_.

Whatever her reasons, Cesare still didn’t like that she was involved, and he said as much to his father, who had been glaring at him from behind his desk.

‘I’m _concerned_ that when we start drowning people, those people are going to kick at anything or anyone within their reach,’ Cesare said, unperturbed by his father’s overt irritation. ‘Ruggiero already threatened to ruin her wedding, what’s to say he won’t try something worse than that when he realizes we’re trying to put him in jail?’ Implied here was, of course, the idea that Lucrezia was the weakest link, and that he’d go for her first. But to Cesare’s mind, it wasn’t a matter of ability or intellect, just of circumstance: his sister was a college student and a young bride, and as much as he detested the latter, it meant that she still had _mani pulite,_ unlike him, his father or even the Cardinal.

‘When we’re through with him, the Cardinal won’t know that she had anything to do with it,’ Rodrigo argued. ‘And she deserves to be included, seeing as it was her idea.’

Cesare hadn’t known this, but he wasn’t surprised now that he knew. ‘I’m sure,’ he mumbled.

Rodrigo stared at his son’s brooding face and felt something that held the middle between pity and fatherly affection – which was a good thing, since it meant he was still capable of feeling this fatherly affection even when it concerned _those two_ , together, like one and one in too close a succession. ‘Just have some patience, it will be fine,’ he said in a warmer tone of voice.

‘She home?’ Cesare asked, so swiftly that the two words melt into one.

His father gave him another long look. ‘She went out for dinner with Alfonso,’ he said finally. ‘Now I must get to work, Cesare, we can’t waste too much time.’

He picked up the phone again, officially closing the conversation. Cesare nodded and left his father.


	4. Part IV: The Game of Repetition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cesare speaks to Lucrezia.

Alfonso was the first to come in the door when he and Lucrezia returned from the Italian restaurant where they’d eaten (“La Rocha Sforza”). He was excited: he’d previously arranged for a dozen roses and a couple of rustic candles, which he’d stored in the spare bedroom of the Borgia house to be placed in her bedroom when they got back. He’d let Lucrezia drive the car – well, Lucrezia had simply taken the wheel, but he scarcely noticed that detail – so she’d have to put it in the garage first. That gave him a very narrow window of time to prepare, and so he raced through the door and up the stairs without noticing that there was a man standing in the hallway. The man was leaning against one of the extravagant white pillars that supported the winding staircase, and was thus easy to overlook. Lucrezia, however, noticed him shortly after she entered and closed the front door behind her.

She was wearing a pantsuit in a deep rose colour, above simple black heels. It would have seemed formal if it hadn’t been for the shimmering black cropped top she wore underneath the blazer, as well as her bright pink lips and the wealth of honey blonde hair that fell down her back.

She realized immediately why he’d come. ‘So, what do you think?’ She asked him. She walked to the base of the stairs, conscious of the loud clicks her heels made on the tiles in the hallway.

His eyes glided from her toes to the tip of her head, but he didn’t reply to her question.

She waited a little while, then dropped her black purse on the lower steps of the staircase and walked up to him. She hesitated for a moment when she came near him, but walked around him in the end. She went to lean against the same pillar, to his right side, facing away from the front door and into the shadows that had gathered below the staircase.

‘Dad has gone positively militant, and he only needed the slightest nudge,’ she informed him.

Cesare only slightly hummed by way of reply, but he might have been clearing his throat.

‘He must really have a thirst for vengeance if he’s willing to turn this into a family project. Hell, if he was willing to take my advice,’ Lucrezia went on. It was all pretence, of course, since she’d come up with the plan in the first place.

‘It’s good that he did, though. He needed something to focus on. He’s been so distracted lately that even Juan clocked in on it.’ She waited for Cesare to chuckle or make some nasty comment about Juan, since he hardly ever missed an opportunity to do so.

When he didn’t, she decided to abandon her conciliatory approach. Something about seeing him at home, standing comfortably around like before, had made her realize that she’d missed him there, and it had made her soft – but that was easily pushed aside again for harsher, easier words.

‘Well, maybe it’s not so much that he’s distracted. Maybe he’s just confused,’ she said, leaving the “and who can blame him” like a clear but unspoken sentence. ‘He’s been entertaining the wildest ideas, you know? Has been for a few weeks now. One wonders where he gets them.’ She paused briefly, but not long enough for him to interrupt her. He wouldn’t have, anyway. ‘But no need to worry, brother,’ she continued. ‘I’ve already talked those ideas out of his head once before this month, I can easily do it again. _Happily,_ if it’s to the benefit of this family.’

Cesare kept quiet. Timing was a delicate thing. Just as Lucrezia was on the verge of saying something else, something more blunt, he opened his mouth. ‘I haven’t seen you in a while,’ he said, as if she hadn’t said anything at all in the past minutes. ‘I wonder, are you avoiding me, dear sister?’

Lucrezia was puzzled for a moment, but then she said: ‘Always,’ realizing that he was mimicking her first words to him when she’d ambushed him in his office. ‘Are we playing a game, brother?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

She turned her head so her cheek lay against the cool marble of the pillar. ‘A game of repetition?’

She could see his profile. He was staring ahead of him, so that in the half-darkness she could only see the white of his eyes. He looked possessed to her, though he would have laughed if she’d told him. Well, he might have.

‘A game of nostalgia,’ he said. She watched his lips move with curiosity.

Cesare abruptly pushed himself away from the pillar and turned on his axis so that he could face her. He put one hand against the pillar next to her head and slipped the other beneath her blazer to touch her naked waist. He didn’t lean in, but he was much too close even so. They were mostly obscured by the shadows, but the lights were on, Alfonso was upstairs with his rustic candles lit and Rodrigo was one room over making phone calls with America’s secret intelligence agency.

‘Maybe we should stop playing games,’ Lucrezia said, though with “we” she mostly meant him.

Cesare realized that too, to her misfortune. He squeezed her waist to tickle, tease, torment, neither of them was sure which.

‘Stop it,’ Lucrezia hissed. She tried to see beyond him but saw only darkness. ‘I’m not joking. Dad nearly lost his mind over that video. You’re lucky he listens to me, otherwise he would have done worse than scream at you. Yeah, I know that he told you not to come by, and he muttered something like that to me too. But what did you think I was going to do, just let you gloat in your office? You don’t have to eat dinner here every night, like I do. You can just snack on bread and holy water at your church, ignore the internet since everyone there is too old to care anyway, and let me straighten everything out with dad. Convince him that you were just choking. How _could_ you be serious, anyway, when you _knew_ that a whole stadium was watching and the whole thing was being filmed? How _could_ you be serious?’

Cesare shrugged. He wasn’t like to feel bad about her situation: they both knew their father doted on Lucrezia, and that Saint Augustine’s wasn’t all bread, holy water and forgiveness. ‘I wasn’t serious,’ he said in a flat voice, the look in his eyes dead. ‘I never am, never was.’

He was hinting at the distant past, which she knew but ignored. ‘Which just goes to show how you haven’t grown up at all,’ she said. ‘But I’m not a child anymore, and I’m not going to stand here like a little lamb every time you decide you have to barge in and tell me what’s what.’

He scoffed. The role of little lamb had never suited her. ‘So what are you going to do, Crezia? Scream?’ He asked, and leaned in. ‘Are you scared of me now, sis?’ He whispered.

‘No, I’m annoyed, and no, I won’t scream, but I’ll kick you where it counts.’ She raised her knee slightly and he obliged her by standing closer to her and putting his feet further apart.

‘Oh, please try,’ he said, grinning. ‘But you know I’m stronger,’ he said. He looked up at the staircase to see if Alfonso had decided to look for his girlfriend. Lucrezia looked at his naked neck and found it strangely appealing to bite him. She judged that that was probably too sexual, though. And too goth. ‘But if you scream your husband will hear you and come down to save you. He’s like that, I think,’ Cesare said, and he looked down into her face again. He squeezed her waist again, but softly. ‘If you’d rather have our daddy come and ban me from this house forever, all you need to do is cough. There’s just one wall separating him from us. You won’t have to defend me anymore, ever.’

‘You think I won’t do it?’ Lucrezia hissed.

‘No, I hope you’ll do it!’ Cesare said, and he laughed. Lucrezia looked to the side nervously, to see if their father had heard. ‘See, I’ve raised the stakes, Crezia,’ Cesare went on, watching her profile. ‘This time it won’t be that cobweb-covered Cardinal on the doorstep, but our very own father.’ He lifted one hand to stroke her hair and then her cheek.

She turned her face back to him. ‘Stop it, I mean it,’ she said. She lifted her leg until she could feel his leg against hers. He looked at her, waiting for the kick.

‘You don’t like the danger of it?’ Cesare asked, when he judged that the impact would never come. His fingers traced the surface of her lips. She pressed her lips together stiffly, but he didn’t take his fingers away. He just leaned closer so that only his hand separated his lips from hers. ‘Be honest, now, Lucrezia. It was _your_ game, after all. I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to,’ he said.

‘It’s you I don’t like,’ she said, and after a moment’s thought, added: ‘You’re my brother.’ She reminded him of that a lot, as if it would suddenly make him – and herself – aware that they belonged to humanity, where there were rules and where certain types of relationship were mutually exclusive.

He chuckled, as he always did when she said something like that. ‘Then you can’t dislike me. Remember, we need to work as a united front now. This is a family project, as you told our father.’

‘Exactly. So you might want to start behaving as my family and not some jealous ex.’

This angered Cesare, but he still didn’t back off. ‘I’m afraid I can’t really tell the difference anymore,’ he said. He looked at something past the pillar before he let his hand drop away from her face. ‘That was your doing, too, Lucrezia. Never forget who started it.’

She wanted to say something about ancient history and that he was just acting up because of Alfonso, but he wasn’t interested anymore. He pushed himself away from the pillar and walked into the hallway, towards the door. She started going after him, her heels making three short clicks on the tiles until they came to a halt. She’d noticed a figure to her right, standing halfway down the staircase.

‘I was wondering where you were,’ Alfonso said to her, but as he said it his eyes were on Cesare, leaving the house without looking back.


	5. Part V: The Bad News

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cesare and Lucrezia await Cardinal Ruggiero to deliver some bad news.

Exactly seven days later, Lucrezia and Cesare sat side by side on the black sofa that stood against the wall outside Cesare’s office. They were silent, waiting. It took longer for the Cardinal to arrive then they’d thought, or sitting next to each other doing nothing was more difficult than they’d thought. Talking hadn’t been forbidden – touching definitely had been – but neither of them knew of anything neutral to say. They just sat staring out the narrow arching windows that looked out over the right wing of the Cathedral. There wasn’t much to see from their vantage point, and besides, there wouldn’t have been many visitors even if they’d sat closer to the window: it was late in the afternoon, and a beautiful day outside.

It was a relief when at last Cardinal Andrea Ruggiero entered the long hallway, though not for Ruggiero, who would be the first victim of the mounting tension between the Borgia siblings.

They watched him come and listened to his scarlet robes brushing the carpet for what again seemed like an unnecessarily long time. It wasn’t the Cardinal’s fault: he may have been old, but he also had to cross about twenty yards of hallway, passing five arched windows and four aesthetically placed pews on his right and three doors with three comfortable sofas on his left.

When he finally stood before Cesare and Lucrezia, none of them extended a greeting.

‘I’m looking for your father,’ Ruggiero said, clearly uncomfortable. Both Cesare and Lucrezia noticed that he avoided looking at their faces.

‘And yet you found us,’ Cesare said, his face expressionless.

‘What a happy coincidence,’ Lucrezia added. She smiled.

‘Indeed,’ Ruggiero said, and smiled back without an ounce of sincerity on his lips.

‘How are you, Cardinal?’ Cesare asked.

‘Alright, thank you.’

‘You look a little sick. Don’t you think, brother?’ Lucrezia asked.

‘Appalled, you mean, sister,’ Cesare said.

‘Appalled?’ The Cardinal repeated, looking from brother to sister.

‘Yes, why would he be appalled?’ Lucrezia asked.

‘I don’t know, maybe he can tell us.’ Cesare bored his eyes into those of the Cardinal, and this time Ruggiero didn’t try to avoid them. He felt entirely justified in his condemnation of these siblings – and why should he not let them know that? As a cardinal, it was his duty. People trembled when confronted with _his_ condemnation. He could hear people sucking in their breaths after they’d given him their confessions; he sometimes heard that sound in his dreams.

‘I know who you are and I know what you do,’ he said, with a stiff upper lip as if he smelled something terrible. For dramatic impact, he clutched the silver cross that hung around his neck, the same way he did in the confessional.

Cesare only laughed when he saw. ‘And what do we do, Your Eminence? Not God’s work, I take it?’

‘No, God wants nothing to do with you two,’ the Cardinal sneered. ‘You can laugh, but I know you, Cesare Borgia, and I know of your contempt for God’ – Cesare made a mocking face here – ‘but even for the godless, incest is the worst of sins.’

‘Don’t forget cannibalism,’ Lucrezia remarked.

‘Oh, yes! I expect you’ll want to accuse us of that too, Your Eminence?’ Cesare joined in.

The Cardinal looked down on their young faces full of mockery and arrogance and entitlement, and resented them most for being young. ‘I will not stand here and watch you spit on everything that is good in this world,’ he said heavily, and he let go of his cross, adjusted his skirts and turned to leave.

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ Cesare warned him. ‘You would only make things worse. Not so much for the world, I guess, since you’re so concerned about that – but you’d definitely make it worse for yourself.’

The Cardinal turned back to glare at the siblings. ‘I see. You let me come here under false pretences so you could buy my silence, or extort it.’ He shouldn’t be surprised, with Rodrigo Borgia for a father. It was only surprising that they’d waited so long.

‘Don’t be silly, Cardinal. Why would we want your silence? I love nothing more than to hear you talk,’ Cesare said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

Ruggiero ignored the comment and said: ‘You’re too late. I already told your father weeks ago. Hasn’t he mentioned it to you?’ He was enjoying this bit and didn’t hide his smug expression. ‘That’s disappointing, I have to say, but it doesn’t change anything. I’ve taken my responsibility.’

‘No you haven’t. You’ve tried to coerce an intelligence officer through unfounded blackmail,’ Cesare said.

The Cardinal was taken aback by this, because it meant that Rodrigo _had_ talked to his children. Then why wasn’t he here? ‘I wouldn’t say _unfounded_ ,’ Ruggiero said. He thought he still had the upper hand, since he had witnessed their crime and was perfectly placed to judge it.

‘I would,’ Cesare retorted. ‘Lucrezia wasn’t the girl in my office. Well, not the one you mean, at least. Lucrezia came by in the afternoon. She even told you hi. But she was never there in the evening.’

Ruggiero scoffed and looked at Lucrezia, expecting she would condone this but not that he would believe her.

‘I was with my boyfriend that night, the one I’m going to marry. I told you about that, remember, at dinner?’ She said. ‘Not that I think I should answer to you about my whereabouts. This accusation of yours is outrageous and perverted.’

‘But true. I know what I saw and when I saw it,’ Ruggiero said firmly.

‘Yes, and just to get it straight: you saw me getting it on with my sister, who is getting married, in a Church, while I knew that you and Cardinal Catalano were still in the building? That is what you saw? How does that sound to you, Lucrezia?’ Cesare asked, turning to his sister.

‘Vile,’ she answered, and made the appropriate face.

Now that Ruggiero heard Cesare describe it in that way, even he had to admit that Lucrezia was right about the outrageous and perverted ring to it, and that made him doubt himself. ‘But you two… I saw you, I’m sure of it. I’m not lying, I know what I saw!’ He exclaimed, and he looked at the Borgia girl. It was the same girl, surely, but her hair was down. He knew he’d seen it up. Or had he seen that during dinner at the Borgia house? ‘You had your hair up in a bun, I think,’ he said, but that hesitation at the end was not a good thing at all.

‘You _think_?’ Cesare repeated.

‘I never really wear it in a bun,’ Lucrezia said. ‘Not in Church, at least.’

‘It had to be you,’ Ruggiero said, with more conviction in his voice than in his mind this time. The firm foundation he’d felt under his feet was slipping away the longer he spoke to the fair-haired, wide-eyed girl with her sweet smile and her dark counter-part, with the sardonic smile and the mad sparkle in his eyes.

‘How can you be sure, Cardinal?’ Cesare asked.

‘Did you see my face? Did you hear me speak, even?’ Lucrezia chimed in.

The Cardinal’s eyes shot from him to her and to the floor. ‘No, but you had your back to me…’ he stammered, as he tried to see the event in his mind again. It had been on replay for days, and yet now it all looked different, indeterminate.

‘Well that’s convenient. You want to know what I think, Your Eminence?’ Cesare asked. ‘I think you’re imagining things.’

‘But it’s not your fault, really,’ Lucrezia said.

Ruggiero looked up at her as if she was his saving grace, and Cesare frowned at her.

She shrugged. ‘You use the same brain processes for remembering and imagining things. It gets all tangled that way, especially if you’re not even sure about what you saw in the first place.’

Ruggiero felt the sweat on his brow and wiped at it with his red sleeve. The afternoon sunlight was coming in from the window at the end of the hallway and seemed to turn the space into a sauna. The siblings weren’t sweating, though. Because they were young, he thought disdainfully.

 _And right, maybe they were also right._ He was no longer sure.

‘I would never have made such an accusation if I didn’t think-’

‘No, you didn’t think, and then you went to my father and you tried to blackmail him,’ Cesare said, and he stood up from the sofa to face the Cardinal and deliver the coup de grâce at a straight, clean angle. ‘That was unwise.’

Ruggiero seemed to shrivel in the face of the handsome dark-haired boy that was crowned in glorious sunlight. He hadn’t ever seen a mortal scene that more vividly reminded him of the angel Lucifer. ‘Even _if_ I was wrong, you must understand that I was doing it for a good cause. I admit that it was for my own gain too, but what kind of a man would I be if I did not inform your father of what I saw?’ Ruggiero said, his voice trembling.

‘Oh, you’d be a bad man, no doubt,’ Cesare replied, again with that sardonic smile on his lips that would have suited the angel of hell.

‘But you’re not a bad man, are you, Cardinal?’ Lucrezia said from the sofa.

Ruggiero immediately fled from her brother to her. ‘No, I’m not! Forgive me if I made a mistake. I only wanted to do what was best. And I want you to know that I don’t expect your father to get me out of this trial as some sort of quit pro quo. As I said, I only asked him for help because I was going to say something anyway, about what I thought I saw. My moral duty just converged with my political ordeal.’

‘So it was a happy convergence of circumstance,’ Cesare concluded.

The Cardinal looked at Cesare and quickly nodded, glad he understood. ‘But if I made a mistake…’ he cleared his throat and clutched at his silver cross again. ‘I apologize.’

‘Very good, Your Eminence. I accept your apology,’ Cesare said, and he turned so he had the sunlight in his back and could look at his sister without having to turn his head around. ‘Lucrezia?’ He asked.

‘Oh, me too. Of course, Cardinal,’ she said.

The Cardinal released a great sigh of relief and sat down on the ornamental wooden bench that stood opposite the sofa, below the arched window. It was the type of bench that one wasn’t supposed to sit on, and that one typically didn’t want to sit on. You’d think they’d thought of cushion-lined seats much earlier in history than they did, because really, it’s a simple concept, isn’t it?

‘But,’ said Cesare, looking down on the Cardinal sitting on that uncomfortable bench. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do.’

Ruggiero frowned vaguely but didn’t look up, too relieved and confused to fully appreciate Cesare’s words. He was still pondering his memory of that day he saw the siblings, doubting himself. But it _had_ been them, hadn’t it? And if he accepted that it had been them, then what had he seen? Had their lips ever touched, or their hands? He couldn’t remember, but to the point where he didn’t even know how it looked when people kissed. He felt like he didn’t know anything anymore, as if some succubus had gotten its hands on him. Or a demon from hell, such as that young man with the wings of sunlight, that stood right in front of him.

The young man was waiting for him to say something.

‘Nothing you can do,’ Ruggiero repeated distractedly. ‘Nothing you can do about what?’

‘About your trial,’ Cesare answered.

Ruggiero looked up now, first at Lucrezia, who he’d decided he felt less threatened by. She was shaking her head solemnly as if someone had died, which Ruggiero couldn’t understand. He turned his attention to Cesare and noticed the cross tattooed in the shell of his ear. He thought it looked rather delinquent.

‘My trial,’ he repeated again, still unable to focus.

‘Yes. I’m sorry to say that you’re going to prison, Your Eminence, very soon,’ Cesare said.

Ruggiero took his mind off the tattooed cross and shook his head wildly. ‘It is still undecided,’ he said. ‘Now, if I continue on the path I was on before, with Cardinal Catalano’s help and of course yours, Cesare, we have a good chance of winning. After I beg your father’s forgiveness for the suggestions that I made, about you and…’ he gestured his hands in the air but quickly dropped them. ‘Anyway, it needn’t impede your hard work on my trial,’ he decided quickly, his cheeks flashing red hot. His cardinal’s robes stuck to him uncomfortably, and his ass already hurt from the hard bench.

‘That’s just it,’ Cesare said. ‘It’s us – well, our _father_ who is sending you to prison. Personally, I don’t really care either which way.’

‘What?’

‘You’re going to have to plead guilty,’ Lucrezia explained. ‘And if you don’t… well.’

Ruggiero looked at her, but she looked out the window at the far side of the hallway. Her brother finished her sentence for her: ‘If you don’t, we’ll tell the whole wide world that you’ve been skimming the top off Saint Augustine’s funds and funnelling them to the _Werwulf Gesellschaft_ , a German neo-Nazi society,’ he said. He smiled when he saw the look on Ruggiero’s face: he couldn’t have been more surprised and horrified if Cesare had whipped out a gun and shot him right in the forehead.

The Cardinal opened his mouth and closed it again. He repeated the sequence a couple of times so that he looked like a fish on land.

‘You want to ask us what we mean by that, because in all your innocence, you just haven’t got the slightest idea what we’re talking about,’ Cesare said helpfully. ‘Allow me to explain. First of all, finding out about the embezzlement was easy. We’ve been suspecting it for some time. Rover has been trying to clear up the financial records you kept of Saint Augustine’s, and they’re a mess. There’s only ever one reason financial records are a mess, and let me tell you, it’s _never_ the secretary’s fault. But you wouldn’t be the first to do this, and it would look worse for Saint Augustine’s than for you… it wouldn’t be enough, in a word.

So I had a look at the files that the plaintiffs have gathered on you, courtesy of a good friend of mine. By the way, if it makes you feel any better, they have shockingly little on you. Not enough for more than three years in prison, with parole, and I think even you can survive that, Cardinal, as long as they let you keep that precious cross of yours.’ Cesare fixed his eyes on the silver cross and was tempted to rip it off its chain and burn it. Not out of hostility against Christianity, but in a rare defence of it: it was bad enough that he graced the hallways of the Church, but to think that an idiot like Cardinal Ruggiero should be wearing that cross like a pious monk…

He blinked and looked at the frightened Cardinal again. ‘They kept track of your activities, did you know that?’ He said. ‘You take a lot of trips to Görlitz for an American cardinal. Always checking into the Benedikt Hotel, probably so you can meet up with a young girl or a boy, even… scandalous either way.’

Ruggiero actually felt more hopeful when Cesare said that, but Cesare was quick to nip that fire in the bud. ‘But that’s not it,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You see, it would happen that the hotel’s Grand Hall is always booked when you’re there, under the name of one Spaniard called Monsignor Angel de Lobo. A fake name, of course, but a fake name is always more telling than a real name.’

He looked at Lucrezia, who’s was looking at the Cardinal with as much satisfaction as Cesare felt. ‘My Spanish is a little rusty, I’m afraid – remind me again, Crezia, what Angel de Lobo mean?’

‘Wolf angel,’ she replied, and she shrugged. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Unless _angel_ is not a Spanish word at all,’ Cesare said. ‘What does angel mean in German, I wonder?’

‘Something like fishing rod,’ she replied.

Cesare chuckled and focused his attention back on the Cardinal. ‘What’s a wolf got to do with a fishing rod, Cardinal?’

Cardinal Ruggiero realized that this was going very badly for him, but he couldn’t think what to do about it except throw Cesare out a window – and he was much too old for that. Pleading ignorance was his only defence, and not a very good one. ‘I can’t imagine,’ he said.

‘Don’t worry about that, we can. Lucrezia?’ Cesare asked.

‘A wolf’s fishing rod doesn’t mean much, but a _Wolfsangel_ certainly is a word,’ Lucrezia said. She’d spent days on this one, virtually ignoring Alfonso. She didn’t feel bad about that, by the way, since Alfonso had thrown a sizeable fit after Cesare left the house the other day. He’d been so furious that he’d knocked some of his rustic candles over and nearly caused the house to burn down. He’d come back the next day with more roses and more rustic candles to make up, but Lucrezia had been too taken by her research to notice. Cesare, who had been working on a lead with his father, _had_ noticed, and _had_ felt bad.

‘The Wolfsangel is a German symbol that resembles a type of historical wolf trap,’ Lucrezia explained to her audience, though they both knew already. ‘The symbol was used by several divisions of the German Wehrmacht, the Flemish Black Brigade, the Dutch National Socialist Movement…’

‘That doesn’t sound too good, Cardinal,’ Cesare commented, making a worried face.

‘It gets worse,’ Lucrezia said. ‘Apparently, it was also the symbol of a German military unit that targeted the Allied forces in the final throws of the Second World War. They called it Operation Werewolf, but it mostly fell apart when the Third Reich did. Although I guess it would be easy for a new group of Nazi-sympathizers to take up this old werewolf banner, as a gesture of… nostalgia.’ She looked at her brother but quickly looked away when she saw that he’d already had his eyes fixed on her.

‘So we did some digging,’ Cesare said, still looking at his sister. ‘We started talking to the locals as part of an ambitious history project, and lo and behold: Görlitz is rife with rumours of an exclusive society that calls itself _Die Werwolf-Gesellschaft_. We tried to find out what the society does, but we kind of hit a wall there. According to most people, they don’t do much. The werewolves are all bark and no bite, pun intended.’ He snickered, but Lucrezia rolled her eyes and the Cardinal acquired a murderous look on his face. He was thinking that he might just find the divine strength to haul Cesare out a window.

Cesare moved on undisturbed. ‘That was somewhat impractical, because we can’t very well take rumours to court now, can we? So our father stepped in. He works with the CIA, but you would know that, of course, Cardinal. He found out that there have been a string of illegal firearms acquisitions and suspicious cash flows in East Germany over the past five years. Of course there’s no receipts in that line of business, but the German intelligence agency is fairly certain that American money is involved. Which led us to believe that you’ve been naughty, Cardinal. Don’t you know that the Church has severed its ties with Nazi’s and dictators, with war and torture and with all totalitarian notions after the Second Vatican Council? We have modernized, and we certainly don’t deal in nostalgia anymore.’ Cesare looked at his sister, but she looked away.

‘I know that, which is why I would never involve myself in something like this,’ Cardinal Ruggiero said, demurely at first, but then he picked his voice up to better show what an outrage all of this was. ‘American money is always connected to illegal firearms acquisitions, and-’

‘Do spare us the excuses, Your Eminence,’ Cesare cut him off. ‘The point is that if all this were to come to light, the Church would be very embarrassed.’

‘If this comes to light,’ Ruggiero said. ‘You have nothing but a house of cards. I wonder what the court will think of your history project when I tell them of your father’s involvement-’

‘You make a good point,’ Cesare interrupted again. He smiled that terrifying smile again that made Ruggiero look away. ‘We probably can’t use half the things we found to build a case. It might all blow up in our faces, if you decide to blackmail us.’

‘I think he already decided that, just now,’ Lucrezia pointed out.

‘Yes, you’re right. And who can blame him? No one wants the shit to hit the fan, not my father, not the CIA and least of all the Vatican. So why wouldn’t the Cardinal here, who has already blackmailed one CIA agent, try and blackmail the entire agency? Why not the Vatican? Both the CIA and the Vatican would rather hack off one of their own limbs than admit to scandal. They would do anything, anything at all to get rid of you, Ruggiero.’ Cesare took a step forward and bent over so he could look the Cardinal straight in his wrinkly face. ‘Do you understand? Anything.’

Ruggiero, in his helpless panic, looked past Cesare to his sister. She had lost her sweet smile and looked as terrifying as her brother now, even sitting down. ‘You’ll lose more than your Cardinalate, Your Eminence,’ she said.

Ruggiero jumped up from the wooden bench in a great hurry, but when Cesare snarled he fell right back down, so that there was nothing but the creaking sounds of the old wood for a moment.

‘You would threaten to kill me, a Prince of the Church?’ Ruggiero shouted through the noise, and then sat down on the bench with his robes dishevelled and his breast going up and down so rapidly they all thought he might suffer a heart attack.

‘Of course not! We’re not monsters,’ Cesare said, when things had calmed down a little. He took his seat next to Lucrezia again on the much more comfortable sofa. ‘No, what we’d do is we’d take all the information we’ve got and take it right back to the source. We’re close to finding out who is the face behind this Monsignor Angel de Lobo, the one who arranges the Grand Hall at the Benedikt and who I’m sure chairs the meetings there too. Once we find out, and we _will_ find out, we’ll send him a letter. How would _Die Werwolf-Gesellschaft_ like to find out about your loose tongue, Ruggiero?’

‘If they’re as merciful as their predecessors, you might prefer prison,’ Lucrezia added.

The Cardinal clutched the wooden bench and shook his head like a child. ‘You can’t!’ He shrieked.

‘We can,’ Lucrezia said.

‘And we will,’ Cesare said.

The Cardinal looked from the one to the other until the siblings seemed like one and the same person.

‘We _are_ very sorry, Cardinal, but it can’t be avoided. Daddy was really angry,’ Lucrezia said. ‘Especially when he heard about the Nazi stuff. He said he can’t in good conscience give you your freedom, but that he would prefer to take it up with your superiors. It’s his moral duty, he said.’

‘Exactly,’ Cesare agreed. ‘Revenge for your entertaining little theory about me and my sister just happened to converge with my father’s moral duty. You understand that, I’m sure.’

‘I take it back, all of it! I- I admit that it was a mistake!’ Ruggiero cried pitifully.

‘What was?’ Cesare asked.

‘All of it, all of it,’ Ruggiero stammered again and again.

‘Well, we all make mistakes,’ Lucrezia said in a honeyed voice.

Cesare gave his sister a sideways glance and then trained his eyes on the panicked Cardinal. ‘Horrible mistakes, I’m afraid it’s true,’ he said, and he let one hand slid past Lucrezia’s leg and under the rim of her skirt. No further than the rim, but it was far from appropriate.

Lucrezia didn’t slam his hand away, but Cesare could feel the muscles in her legs contract; perhaps because she was unsure whether he’d meant it as a cruel jest aimed at the Cardinal or aimed at her.

For the Cardinal, this hand movement seemed to be the crown on his betrayal. He looked so violated by it that he might have turned into Jesus solely on account of his Judas-complex.

‘Cardinal Ruggiero. You and I should talk,’ Rodrigo’s voice came from the doorway suddenly.

Lucrezia jumped even more than Ruggiero did, but Cesare’s hand was already gone from her leg. She shifted on her seat so that she directly faced her father and wouldn’t be able to see Cesare at the edge of her vision.

The Cardinal seemed too dazed to move at first. He just stared at Rodrigo as if he were looking at his jailor – and he was, in effect.

Rodrigo turned to his children and said: ‘Thank you for receiving the good Cardinal. I hope there was no unpleasantness.’

Cesare grinned and Lucrezia smiled her sweet smile. Seeing that, Cardinal Ruggiero found his courage and outrage again, and catapulted himself out of the bench he wasn’t supposed to be sitting on. ‘Rodrigo, I came to beg your forgiveness,’ he said. ‘I had no idea how wrong I was about what I saw, and of course I should have never made it seem as if I expected you to do something _illegal_ for me in exchange for my silence… I only wanted to make you aware of a grave situation, which came on top of this trial! I thought you wouldn’t be able to focus. Surely you will not punish me for that?’

Rodrigo put up his hand the way a priest does when he blesses a sinner, with the hand clenched loosely and the two middle fingers pointing proudly to the ceiling. ‘My dear Andrea, you look so distraught. I did not invite you here to _punish_ you. Only to teach.’

‘Teach?’ Ruggiero repeated.

‘ _Teach._ Lessons in deceit. Don’t get me wrong, Your Eminence, I am not necessarily averse to doing something illegal if it would help your case. I _am_ the government, and if you’re the government, there’s a certain stretch that comes with the concept of legality.’

This admission made a light go on behind Cardinal Ruggiero’s eyes. ‘Then we understand each other! You will help me,’ he said hopefully.

‘No, but I will teach you a lesson in deceit, if you would be kind enough to listen, Your Eminence,’ Rodrigo replied.

‘Yes, yes, if that means I have your forgiveness for my… for what I said about your family,’ Ruggiero said.

‘That’s precisely where you go wrong. I was talking about business, was I not, Your Eminence? And yet you make it conditional upon something personal. Do you sense where I’m going?’ Rodrigo replied.

‘I don’t think he does, dad. But you are taking a long time to get to the point,’ Cesare said.

Lucrezia threw him an expression of warning over her shoulder, but he just grinned wickedly at her.

Rodrigo didn’t reprimand his son, but said: ‘Maybe I am. Let me explain it as shortly and clearly as I can: this is not about you requesting that I resolve something for you, even if it entails something illegal. It’s not even about your questionable decision to join a neo-Nazi society, a decision I cannot say I can condone, Cardinal. This is about that horrid mixture of business matters and personal matters. It is already difficult enough to keep those two apart with a job like mine, but for you to so unscrupulously cross those borders… that did not please me particularly, Cardinal.’

‘Much better,’ Cesare judged. ‘I think that should have been clear. Cardinal?’

‘What can I do, Rodrigo?’ Ruggiero pleaded, ignoring that devil of a son. ‘Surely there is something. Anything.’

Rodrigo gave the Cardinal a pleasant smile. He took a step beg and gestured towards Cesare’s office. ‘We shall see. If you would join me, Your Eminence?’

Ruggiero did not know how quickly he could walk into the office, and he didn’t look over his shoulder once, wishing to never see the Borgia siblings ever again.

Rodrigo smiled at his children, who sat next to each other without touching or looking at each other. It suited him just fine, and largely because of that he hadn’t noticed Cesare’s hand leaving Lucrezia’s leg or the crackling air that ran between them.

So he followed Ruggiero and closed the door to Cesare’s office feeling content with the way things had turned out.


	6. Part VI: The Bad Decision

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Having delivered their bad news to the Cardinal, the siblings are left alone and make a bad decision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little more graphic than the rest - I usually rate everything Mature, but this might be Explicit? I'm never sure when it crosses the line, but I'm mentioning it in any case!

The siblings sat quietly for one more minute, both waiting for the other to speak. They were aware of a certain heaviness to the air, like a vacuum had been created the moment their father had closed their door behind himself and the Cardinal Andrea Ruggiero. They both knew what it was, that heavy-weighing hole of silence, though neither of them had a name for it nor knew of a way to deal with it – very far from it.

Lucrezia was the first one to speak, and once again, the only one.

‘I promised Alfonso I’d go over the seating charts for the wedding tonight. I’ve been stalling for weeks,’ she declared to announce her departure, and she stood up to go. She didn’t see the point in drawing anything out, and frankly, she was afraid of what might happen if she did. What _Cesare_ might do, to be sure. She remembered his hand on her leg as vividly as if he had never pulled it away – and it would be just like him to touch her again, to try. It would also be like her to allow it, but that didn’t occur to her.

Cesare nodded by way of reply to her announcement, though he hadn’t really listened and she wasn’t looking at him to see the movement of his head.

She stood still, her mind racing with lustful and scandalous thoughts that did not include her fiancé. She waited for the thoughts to go away or to morph into something or _someone_ else, but instead the imagery in her head became livelier, hungrier. She suspected that it was because of their talk with the cardinal, and the toxic air between them that had been created the moment she’d walked into his office to give him the wedding invitation. She wondered again whether that had been a mistake on her part, but how could she have predicted that he would come to the house and ambush her in the hallway? She didn’t have any control over his actions. She could only control how she felt about them.

So that was why she waited, to take back the control she imagined she had over herself, not realizing that she probably had more control over Cesare’s actions than she did over her own feelings. She stayed to convince herself that she hadn’t liked what she’d had to do in his office, or what he’d done in the hallway, and that she could purge herself from any scandalous thoughts she might have even as she stood next to her brother in that very moment. Even if she did have scandalous thoughts, then they must have arisen from a desire for an ancient past: a past that she had no intentions of staying in, certainly not with her brother. She was better now.

This appropriate tale obscured the truth, of course, and the possibility that Lucrezia was waiting only so someone else could make a decision that she felt too morally superior to make –so she waited and waited, thinking that it was for the right reasons.

Meanwhile Cesare sat on the sofa, leaning on his knees with his elbows and letting his head hang down the way players sit on the bench after playing the field. He knew she was still there, and he didn’t know why. He wasn’t really thinking about it, anyway; he _was_ thinking about them, but not in the present sense.

Lucrezia turned around eventually, thinking that she should resolve her issue with more words when in fact words only made it worse.

‘What you did at the football game was unacceptable,’ she said.

He could have easily pointed out that she had kissed him back, but he just nodded in agreement. This surprised Lucrezia, who had expected the usual pushback in the form of a crude remark.

A little uneasily, she went on: ‘But what I did was unacceptable too. Ambushing you in your office with the wedding invitation, sitting on your desk and getting in your space just to see how you would react.’

Cesare looked up at her with a frown, because he hadn’t expected such honesty, nor had he fully accepted the idea that she’d come into his office with cruel intentions.

In the end he gave her a single nod with his head, signifying acceptance and resignation. It left Lucrezia strangely unsatisfied.

‘I admit that I had a… _bloodlust_ after the football game,’ she said, frustrated because her thoughts were the same as before, and bloodlust had a double meaning that she was distinctly aware of.

Cesare looked at her but said nothing. He didn’t particularly take note of her choice of words, though he was surprised that she was admitting to so much. It was uncharacteristically direct.

‘I should have done it differently and I should have done it sooner,’ Lucrezia said.

Cesare just gave her the single nod again and then looked down at the carpet. He did not sense her insatiableness and her mounting dissatisfaction because he only felt his own – so he expected her to leave him behind. His instinct was to prevent that from happening, of course, but that was nothing new. He tried to sit still despite that nagging feeling in his breast that urged him to keep her close, and succeeded in it. He thought he might be getting better at the process, excruciating as it was.

Lucrezia was fast deteriorating, however, and all that time she waited and waited and talked and talked in the hopes she could wipe it away. As she looked down on him, and noticed his chestnut curls and his dark eyebrows, the tip of his nose that stuck out and the dent that he was making in his lower lip with his teeth – lips the colour of mulberry – her appetite grew to monstrous sizes.

‘I guess I wanted to say that I’m sorry,’ she heard herself say, but there wasn’t a bone in her body that agreed.

Cesare had been distracted, but upon hearing those words his frown deepened. He looked up to finally offer her some words, with a question mark at the end, but he never got that far. Lucrezia had scooped down, taken his face between the palms of her hands and kissed him.

Cesare’s hands went up helplessly, suspended in the air as if he was about to be placed under arrest – and to be fair, his offence was criminal, even if he was only guilty by complicity this time. He didn’t actively kiss her back, but he didn’t _not_ kiss her back. His lips were undeniably soft and warm and impressionable, like willing students of her lips, and the wild beating of his heart was only partly inspired by the shock of her move.

Lucrezia pulled away after a few seconds and stumbled back to the middle of the hallway. She covered her mouth with her hand as if her mouth had a will of its own, and she hadn’t meant for it to attack Cesare’s.

Cesare sat perplexed for a moment. There had been many moments when he’d expected such a thing to happen, but he usually saw himself as the initiator and besides, this was not one of those moments. As they’d sat there on the sofa side by side, as they’d spoken to the Cardinal in such perfect unison, it had felt to him like they’d reached the end of their game, or at least another impasse. She would get married and he’d date or sleep around; old memories would be buried again, but deeper this time.

He looked up at Lucrezia, who was staring at him. She looked lovely, lovely like always, wearing a light summer dress that lit up in the afternoon sun. It was an emerald green that matched her hazel eyes, though they were big and round with horror now as they scanned his face. The rest of her face was still covered by her hand.

Cesare made a decision in a split second – he never did need much time to decide how he felt about something, like she did. He jumped off the sofa to stand before her, plucked her hand right away from her face and kissed her. She made a slight whimpering sound but responded to his lips, which were no longer passive. This time, he opened his mouth and flicked out his tongue, and she followed suit.

It went on for an indeterminate though surely large amount of time, during which they didn’t move from their initial position: with him clasping the hand that she’d held against her mouth while he had his other hand against the back of her neck, and with her free hand on his breast as if she had every intention of pushing him away. But as his kisses grew more demanding and their breathing came faster, their hands started roaming, to find other things to touch and stroke.

They stumbled backwards eventually and their legs discovered the bench one wasn’t supposed to sit on. Cesare moved to sit down, barely disentangling himself from Lucrezia in the process. She climbed on top of his lap, making the bench creak loudly. Neither of them heard it.

His mouth found her neck and started kissing it passionately. Lucrezia closed her eyes and held her temple against his while he touched every nerve he could find on her skin. She moaned when she felt the touch of his warm tongue. He smiled when he heard and went on to suck at the skin just beneath her jaw.

Lucrezia tilted her head to allow him better access and writhed on his lap. He was wearing a thin summer suit, so she could feel his manhood pressing against her thigh through the cloth of his pants. She put her hand on it, so that her fingers closed around his bulge and the back of her hand slid past her panties. Cesare grunted when he felt her touch but didn’t take his lips away from her neck. Instead, he kissed her with more determination than before, while his hands slid down past her back to push her closer on top of him. Then one of his hands joined hers, though rather than lingering in the small space that was still between their bodies, it slipped further up her thigh. She took her hand away and put them against his neck, while his fingers found the elastic band of her panties. They slipped inside them to gently stroke her. She helped by grinding against his hand.

Soon they were both heaving. She tried to kiss him but had to come up for breath often, so that they were just breathing against each other’s lips mostly. When his fingers slid inside her, smooth as silk, she ripped her mouth away from his and lifted her head to the ceiling. She arched her back and placed her hands on the wall behind him for more support.

She was surprised to feel the wall much colder and much sleeker than expected. She opened her eyes and saw that that was because the wall wasn’t a wall at all – it was glass.

She’d forgotten about the arched windows lining the hallway, even though they’d both stared through this very one for a least ten minutes. What was even more disconcerting: this particular window looked out over the right wing and part of the ship of the Cathedral, which was still open to the public, and right then there was a young boy looking straight at them. He was sitting on one of the pews and seemed to be regarding her and Cesare with some fascination. From his vantage point he couldn’t have seen much, and he was only just a child – but suppose he got an adult, then that adult would surely understand the nature of their activities, even if it was one story up.

Lucrezia pushed away from the glass and more or less catapulted herself backwards. She would have fallen from the bench if Cesare’s arm hadn’t been around her. He glanced up at her with a dazed look in his eyes and took his hand out of her panties to grab her waist and steady her.

Seeing her fear made him more alert. He didn’t look back at the window, which she was still staring at, but let his gaze fall on the door to his own office. To their luck, it was undisturbed. There were no signs that this had been any different in the previous half hour. But they were both aware of what they’d done: for neither of them had thought of the risk. Instead they’d behaved like animals, without any kind of restraint.

That did not make them animals, though Cesare and Lucrezia would both consider the possibility that it did – but in fact it was the endless pull and tug, the waves beating against a dam until one day it is one drop too many and it crashes past the restricting boundaries, knowing little restraint when it does.

Lucrezia moved to get off Cesare’s lap, and he quickly let go of her waist.

They stared at each other, mirroring each other’s horror almost in a comical way.

‘I’m just going to get some air,’ Lucrezia stammered, and then she took off. Cesare watched her walk through the hallway and down the stairs, but he didn’t turn around to peek through the window so he could see her cross the ship of the Cathedral.

When she’d been gone for about five minutes, he got up from the bench and went into the bathroom at the end of the hallway. He leaned on the sink and stared at his reflection in the mirror. His cheeks had been drained of all colour, which contrasted strangely with his raw, red lips. His erection continued to push painfully against his pants. He despised it, but neither that nor his lust would leave him: everything was on fire with the memory of her touch.

Finally he fled into one of the cubicles where he undid his pants, took out his swollen member and brought himself to a quick and merciful release. It never felt so good or so bad as it did that time, and he hated himself for it.

He cleaned himself up after and leaned his forehead against the door of the cubicle, still panting. He wanted to scream or cry, but who would hear him, God? What mercy could he expect, from anyone?

In the end he battered the door with his fists until they were bruised and the door slightly unhinged. It didn’t help one little bit. But he knew that he had to get out and get on with life, and so he did: he washed his hands in the sink without looking at his reflection, and went back to the sofa in front of his office, to wait for his father to come out.

Lucrezia, meanwhile, had not gone for air but locked herself in one of the confessionals in the left wing of the Cathedral. No Cardinals were on duty, so she was alone with God.

She tried to pray for forgiveness because she felt like she should, but was soon hit by the realization that she didn’t know what she wanted forgiveness for. It wasn’t the inappropriate touching itself that she felt worst about, though of course it had been a bad, bad slip-up. It was rather more the blind fixation that had accompanied it. The moment his lips had found hers, there hadn’t been a past or a future in sight: she had lost the past she’d been so afraid to drown in, and she hadn’t cared about the future she’d been afraid would close in on her, by a doorway opening and someone stepping out onto the hallway. There had only been the present, and that was more frightening than anything else – because there was a sweet freedom to living in the now, a soft tingly feeling in her limbs and her loins that only made her want to go back up and continue living in the now.

So she was praying for forgiveness for her terrible sin in an empty confessional, but meanwhile the sin lived on undisturbed in her mind. She didn’t know if thoughts counted, but she guessed they did. She’d proved only minutes before that it’s not a long way at all from thought to action, and contrary to what she’d been telling herself, she wasn’t as good at changing her thoughts as she thought she was.

The yearning and the guilt built up inside her until she couldn’t take it anymore and she catapulted herself out of the confessional the way she’d catapulted herself off the wooden bench and her brother’s lap. She considered leaving, but couldn’t think what she should do or wanted to do once she got outside. Perhaps if she stayed in the Cathedral long enough, she could leave her inner desires there too.

She sat down on one of the pews in the centre of the Cathedral for a couple of minutes and then drifted up the stairs again, to find her brother back on the sofa. She recalled that she’d found him exactly like that earlier that day, when they were getting ready to receive Cardinal Ruggiero.

She did the only logical thing, and went to sit next to him the same way she’d done earlier that day. Neither of them spoke, so that it was as if nothing had happened and they would hear the sound of Ruggiero’s sweeping robes any moment.


	7. Part VII: The Tall Man and the Pretty Lady

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rodrigo joins his children again and extends an invitation to Cesare. Last chapter of the short.

Neither of them could have said how much time passed before their father opened the door of Cesare’s office and stepped outside. Neither of them had opened their mouths in that time, and somehow they also managed to have few thoughts: Cesare was staring at a mental image of the stall door of the toilet down the hall, right where someone had written _Fuck God_ in red marker; Lucrezia was thinking about the boy that she’d seen through the window. He’d had black curls, like Cesare had had when he was younger.

Rodrigo exited the office and walked up to the sofa to stand before his two obedient children. ‘Well done,’ he said, startling both of them. ‘I’m proud of you, both of you,’ he added, when he saw fear flash across one of their faces.

‘What’s going to happen to Cardinal Ruggiero?’ Cesare asked, to move past the awkward – and undeserved – praise. His voice sounded gritty and raw, but Rodrigo didn’t notice.

‘I’m not sending him to prison just yet,’ Rodrigo answered. This would have annoyed Cesare otherwise, who both disliked having the Cardinal on the loose and failing to do what Rodrigo had so passionately promised. But now Cesare had difficulty caring about what would happen to the Cardinal, so he jujst nodded in acceptance.

Rodrigo went on anyway: ‘He is still of use to us,’ he said. ‘That society he’s a part of is more important to the CIA. We’re going to continue working on his trial, but I dare say that he knows his place now. So!’ He clapped in his hands, making Lucrezia flinch. ‘We can conclude this unpleasant chapter and move on to happier things.’ He gave his daughter a significant look. She stared back non-plussed. ‘Your wedding,’ Rodrigo clarified, and she quickly produced a smile that wasn’t entirely ingenuine. Her wedding offered her a welcome escape of whatever she’d gotten herself into, though of course she didn’t realize that it should have worked as a prevention.

‘Which reminds me, Cesare,’ Rodrigo said, and he fixed his eyes on his son. ‘You are invited, of course.’

Lucrezia frowned and looked from the one to the other. She hadn’t known that Cesare had been uninvited. ‘You said he couldn’t come?’ She asked her father, the displeasure clear in her voice.

Rodrigo waved his arms around to swat away the problem. ‘Temporary measure. But of course we need the whole family there,’ he said, and looked at Cesare again. Cesare was staring at Lucrezia, waiting for her to say something. Lucrezia noticed her brother’s eyes on her but didn’t return the look.

‘Thank you, dad,’ Cesare said at last, and he ripped his eyes away from Lucrezia. ‘But I think I’ll pass.’

‘I know things have been hard lately, and I know I haven’t been fair to you. I’m sorry, son,’ Rodrigo said. When he found Cesare unresponsive – in fact, Cesare was looking at Lucrezia again and didn’t seem to care much about his father’s words – he added: ‘If you won’t do it for me, then do it for your sister. She would be devastated if you didn’t come.’

‘Then I’m sorry, too. But I’ve had enough _family_ for a while,’ Cesare replied.

Rodrigo shook his head in bewilderment. Cesare didn’t wait for him to say something else, but just gave his father a firm nod to seal his words and then walked past him and Lucrezia.

He was already in the ship of the Cathedral when Lucrezia called his name, the word echoing ominously through the hazy light of the church. It wasn’t dark outside yet, but the grey stone walls and the large square pillars seemed to drain both colour and warmth from the sunlight, turning it into a pale mist.

Cesare stopped and hesitated for a moment. The door was only a few paces further. He turned around anyway. Lucrezia stood in front of the alter, in one of the bleak spots of light that came in through the main window. He could see fine particles of dust moving in the air above her head.

When they stood about ten steps removed from each other, he stood still and glared at her. ‘What was that?’ He demanded.

Lucrezia was intimidated by the angry tone in his voice, especially because of the detached and calm demeaner that had preceded it. ‘I had no idea that he’d revoked your invitation. If I’d known, I would have set him straight-’

‘I’m not talking about dad or your _wedding_ ,’ Cesare spat. ‘I mean you. What _was_ that, Lucrezia?’

She blinked at him but truly seemed at a loss for an answer.

‘Let me rephrase the question. Are you going to call of the wedding?’

Now she averted her eyes, and that, of course, was answer enough.

Cesare scoffed and shook his head. ‘I thought so,’ he said.

‘You’re not coming?’ Lucrezia asked, her voice small.

He gave her a look that bordered on disgust. ‘No, I’m not,’ he said. Then he crossed the distance between them and put his face straight in front of hers, his expression mean and menacing. ‘And I’ll tell you why, sister,’ he whispered. ‘It’s because you’re a fucking tease, and I should know fucking better.’ He stepped back with his arms spread wide as if to embrace the beam of light around them. ‘ _My mistake_.’

Then he turned around and walked out of the cathedral, leaving Lucrezia to stare after him.

On his way out, he passed one visitor that had lingered; on the last row of pews, a little boy with raven black curls and startlingly blue eyes sat wiggling his short legs. He was waiting to see his uncle return, but it was taking him a long time. He’d seen something through the window and hoped it was him, but it had been the blonde lady and the tall man. He’d seen the blonde lady enter one of the wooden stands shortly afterwards, and now they were both down here. The boy had wanted to walk up to them and ask them about his uncle, but he knew it wasn’t polite to interrupt and he didn’t want to be impolite if God could see. So he waited, kicked his legs in the air and watched the tall man talk to the blonde lady. When the man started walking down the aisle, the boy pushed himself off the pew and walked to the beginning of the row, letting his hand slide across the wooden rim of the next row of benches. The man turned his head and fixed his eyes on the boy. The boy blinked, forgetting that he had to ask something.

The tall man stopped and went to stand in front of the boy. ‘Are you lost?’ he asked.

The boy had to look way up to see into the tall man’s face. He shook his head by way of reply.

‘Waiting for someone?’ the tall man tried again.

The boy nodded.

‘Alright,’ the tall man said, and moved away from the pew to go to the door. The boy followed him and stepped out into the aisle. ‘Why are you crying?’

The tall man stopped and looked back, but his gaze fell on the altar and not the boy. ‘God made me,’ he said.

‘Because you were mean to the pretty lady?’

‘Yes, because I was mean to the pretty lady.’

‘Maybe if you say sorry God will make it stop,’ the boy suggested. God made him cry sometimes too, and then all he had to do was say sorry.

The tall man looked at the boy and nodded. ‘Maybe,’ he said. Then he turned and left, without stopping this time. The boy watched him go before sitting back down again and kicking his legs in the air.

The little boy wasn’t the only one watching: one could spy an older man in a grey suit, standing on the first floor, behind a window pane where the curious outline of a hand was still visible in the glass. Rodrigo Borgia was looking down at the heart of the Cathedral, where his children had been standing. He did not see the face of sin, either on the glass in front of him or down there in front of the altar; but even he could see the memory of it, caught in the grim light of dusk. It was a ghostly footprint of sin called _desiderium,_ a sin of desire trapped in his two youngest children but trying unscrupulously to claw its way out.


End file.
